Imagine waking up and…
Your alarm goes off at 6am. By the time your feet hit the floor, an AI agent has scanned your smart fridge, noticed you’re low on your favourite milk and already
placed a grocery order that will be delivered by 8am. On your way to work, your agent has rebalanced your monthly budget after a spending ‘blowout’ at a restaurant last night, paid a tradesperson for yesterday’s garden job and settled your Spotify subscription.
None of that went via bank transfer or credit card. Instead, it all happened instantly over stablecoins.
This isn’t sci-fi. It’s where two powerful forces – AI agents and stablecoins – are heading. Galaxy Digital’s CEO Michael Novogratz
recently predicted that the biggest users of stablecoins will soon be AI. And as the
Herald
recently explored, big tech companies are already being asked to weigh in on who carries responsibility if an AI agent makes a mistake, how privacy is protected when agents act on our behalf and what level of trust consumers should place in these systems.
Although the exact timeline is up for debate, the direction feels inevitable.
But what does that mean for those of us building in the crypto and Web3 space?
Reimagining wallets as bridges
TradFi (traditional finance) is the world of banks,
credit cards and legacy payment systems. It is highly regulated, but often slow and siloed.
DeFi (decentralised finance) is its mirror image
– blockchain-based, open-source and built around peer-to-peer interactions without intermediaries. The first step in making this shift real is reimagining how digital wallets bring these two worlds together.
Today, most people think of a crypto wallet as just a place to hold tokens. Tomorrow, that same wallet needs to act as a bridge between TradFi and DeFi – a control
hub where programmable money (stablecoins), smart approvals (with blockchain based rules) and AI agents to perform tasks come together. By connecting the two, we’re building infrastructure that gives users the familiarity and trust of traditional finance with
the speed, transparency and programmability of decentralised finance.
Think about it like this: if your AI agent wants to pay a vendor or top up your KiwiSaver, a wallet should handle approvals, fire off the stablecoin payment and produce
clean reporting for tax or compliance, all in one flow. No spreadsheets and no manual reconciliations. In other words, AI is looking for a digitally native currency and stablecoin are the natural pair.
This isn’t just about functionality but also about trust. If AI agents are going to touch people’s money, our wallets are where clarity and accountability need to
live.
Making stablecoins intuitive
A lot of people still trip up on what stablecoins are and how to use them. They know that their value is ‘pegged’ to fiat (or that one unit of their local currency
is designed to always equal one unit of a digital stablecoin), but for most users that’s very abstract. What matters is their experience of using them.
Think back to how New Zealand’s Sharesies platform made investing intuitive for everyday investors – no jargon, no intimidating dashboards…just simple pathways into
something complex. We should be asking ourselves: what’s the crypto equivalent for payments, treasury and everyday spending?
For example, imagine paying your electricity bill in USDC (or whatever currency is native to you) without ever feeling like you left dollars. Picture sending $20
to a mate after dinner and having it settle instantly without bank cut-off times. Or, consider an SME automating payroll in stablecoins while the wallet automatically handles FX and compliance.
The complexity has to be abstracted away, leaving something so easy that it feels obvious. This is how stablecoins will go from niche to default.
Competing like a fintech
If Novogratz is right and stablecoins become the default cash leg for AI and ecommerce, crypto teams will need to start thinking like seasoned fintech operators.
This means sweating the details of user experience so transactions feel frictionless – because AI agents aren’t going to tolerate clunky confirmation flows or system timeouts. It also means stepping up on compliance because as
Herald
pointed out, even Visa and Mastercard are grappling with questions around liability should AI agents spend on your behalf.
Stablecoins won’t get a free pass here and we’ll need to build compliance rails that regulators can trust and customers can understand.
Open banking has already shown how powerful APIs can be in reshaping finance, and crypto has to learn from this playbook. For stablecoins, this could mean direct
integration into the everyday flows people and businesses rely on: payroll, e-commerce checkouts and treasury dashboards.
Huge payoffs with very real risks
The collision of AI agents and stablecoins could create efficiency and scale in ways we haven’t seen before. For consumers, the drawcard is convenience: agents quietly
paying bills, renewing subscriptions and taking care of shopping, all in the background and all without friction. For businesses, the payoff is speed and cost reduction. Suddenly, micro-transactions that once seemed uneconomic suddenly become viable when settlement
is both instant and cheap. For the financial system as a whole, the combination adds resilience by reducing reliance on ageing infrastructure and introducing alternative rails.
Of course, the risks are also very real because AI opens up a new frontier of questions around privacy, liability, digital identity and error. But these are the kinds
of problems the fintech and crypto sectors have been tackling for years and if anything, the challenge is familiar: balancing innovation with trust.
Every so often, two technology waves collide and create something bigger than either could achieve alone. AI agents and stablecoins feel like one of those collisions.
Our job is to make sure that when this happens, the experience is seamless and safe and the benefits are felt not just by early adopters but by everyday people.
Disclaimer: Investing in crypto carries risk. Always do your own research or seek professional
advice. Terms and Conditions apply
