40 min ago3 min readBillions of AI agents will be swarming the internet in the next few years, but the question now is what currency will they be using. Nobody has the answer yet. AI bots and robots. (Julian Tromeur/Unsplash)SummaryAnimoca Brands Chairman Yat Siu expects 50 billion to 100 billion autonomous AI agents to transact online in the coming years, potentially using crypto wallets instead of bank accounts.Industry leaders disagree over whether agents will use thousands of tokens or converge on a neutral “super currency” that is not tied to any country.Agentic commerce could generate $1.5 trillion globally by 2030, but trust, identity and authorization safeguards must improve before autonomous payments can operate at scale.​Fifty to one hundred billion AI agents. That is Yat Siu’s estimate of how many autonomous machine actors he expects to be transacting on the internet over the next few years. Siu, co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands, is not hedging. “The future of the web is heavily agentic,” he said in a video interview. “Everything will be done by agents.”This is not theoretical for Animoca. The company pivoted from virtual worlds to an AI-driven metaverse in May and announced an investment program of up to $10 million for developers building applications on its AI agent platform, Minds. Siu’s argument is that the metaverse may no longer be somewhere people go. Instead, AI agents could handle bookings, payments, scheduling and commerce in the background on their behalf.That leaves a fundamental question for Animoca and the wider industry: what will those agents use to pay each other?“There will be an AI currency coming,” said Erald Ghoos, CEO of OKX Europe, in a video interview. “This is not going to be fiat, for sure. It will be a stablecoin or some other crypto token, whatever this is going to be, that is going to be by far, by far the largest currency that this world has ever seen.”He predicted that there would be one “super currency” coming specifically for AI agents. “It could be a stablecoin, or it could be something else. Let’s see what works.”Siu agrees that agents will need crypto-based money rather than conventional bank accounts. Stablecoins, perhaps, he added. For sure, not bank accounts, because AI agents can’t open them yet, at least. Traditional payment systems require human identity verification.“To make an agent truly autonomous, you need a way for them to use and own money,” he said. “A crypto wallet would seem the most obvious way. It’s going to be a long while before any bank opens a bank account for an AI agent. Crypto basically solves all of that. Crypto is the perfect machine banking system.”Where Siu and Ghoos differ is in whether agents will converge on a single dominant currency. Siu does not necessarily see one settlement currency taking over. He said agents could transact across thousands of tokens without forcing the human owner to make sense of each one. “The agent knows what to do,” he said. “The human never has to focus his attention on a thousand tokens.”Ghoos, by contrast, thinks a single country’s stablecoin may struggle to become a global standard. A USD-denominated stablecoin makes sense for AI agents enabled by people and businesses in America. But would China’s AI agents use a U.S.-dollar-pegged stablecoin? Would the U.S. allow a yuan-denominated stablecoin to serve as the world’s AI settlement currency?“There will be some geopolitical, geo-economic concerns about having just one that is linked to a country," Ghoos said. "It might be something more abstract."In other words, Ghoos is describing a neutral machine currency: one that can work across borders and jurisdictions without being tied to the economy or political interests of a single country.Even if the currency problem is solved, agent-to-agent payments will need safeguards before they can operate at scale. Debo Sen, Citi’s head of payments, said industry protocols must first address trust, identity and authorization before agents can make purchases without a human in the loop. She also said such activity may first emerge in small merchant transactions before moving to higher-stakes business-to-business payments.The payoff could be lucrative as Juniper Research forecasts that agentic commerce will generate $1.5 trillion globally by 2030, though it does not say which currency automated agents will use. The choice matters because it could determine how agents pay across borders and which networks handle those transactions.Keith Grose, Coinbase’s senior managing director for international, said the wider battle is still over who builds and controls that infrastructure. “The question is: who’s going to own those rails, or will they be shared rails or permissionless rails?” he said. “It’s too early to tell.”12345678910Anvil: The Missing Collateral LayerAnvil: The Missing Collateral LayerAnvil is a shared on-chain collateral layer built on a programmable letter of credit: reserve assets as a guarantee -no loan, no interest, keep custody & yield.Jul 29, 2026Anvil is a shared on-chain collateral layer built on a programmable letter of credit: reserve assets as a guarantee -no loan, no interest, keep custody & yield.Why it matters:Anvil is a shared on-chain collateral layer built on a programmable letter of credit: reserve assets as a guarantee -no loan, no interest, keep custody & yield.View Full Report