AI Agents Need Crypto As Outdated TradFi Rails Can’t Support Real-Time Markets: Coinbase
Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents will need crypto and its underlying blockchain technology because traditional finance’s legacy rails are too slow to support real-time markets, according to Coinbase.
“If we’re going to move to this world and have this wonderful advantage of these agents acting at infinitely fast speeds, they have to act on infinitely fast and scalable money rails,” said Coinbase’s head of institutional strategy, John D’Agostino, in an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “And that’s what blockchain and crypto is.”
“Infinitely Scalable Intelligence” Meets “Infinitely Scalable Source Of Truth”
D’Agostino described AI as “infinitely scalable intelligence” and crypto’s underlying technology as an “infinitely scalable source of truth,” and said they have the potential to “work very well together.”
He said AI agents will act on people’s behalf, rather than giving users information, and will need to operate on “true sources of information,” adding that it would be “disastrous if they didn’t.”
In finance, for example, there could come a time when agentic AIs don’t just analyze investors’ stock portfolios, but also optimize them by performing tax loss harvesting, according to the Coinbase executive.
In addition to use cases in the financial industry, D’Agostino said that AIs could one day be used to screen people for cancer.
This, he says, will involve purchasing data sets. While scientists can potentially do five screenings a day, these AI agents might be able to perform billions of these same tests each day.
“For that AI agent to purchase that data set to do that experiment at that scale, to ask it to rely on 100-year-old rails, it’s sort of like trying to stream K-Pop Demon Hunters on a 1994 dial-up modem,” he said. “It simply doesn’t work.”
TradFi Is Already Utilizing Blockchains
Traditional financial institutions are already moving to the blockchain. Recently, SWIFT announced that it is developing a blockchain-based shared ledger for cross-border payments in collaboration with over 30 banks and Ethereum ecosystem developer Consensys.
Nine large European banks also plan to launch a euro-denonominated stablecoin by mid/late 2026. Meanwhile, banks such as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, BNY Mellon, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan are also investigating stablecoin rails and related infrastructure.
On the AI front, payments giant Stripe has already integrated with AI, and recently introduced “Instant Checkout,” which allows ChatGPT users to buy items directly in a chat.
Both Stripe and OpenAI also developed the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which is an open source standard meant to let AI agents and merchants transact securely across platforms.
How ACP works (Source: OpenAI)
While Stripe does not have its own blockchain, it does support crypto payments and gives merchants the ability to accept payments in USDC on various chains.
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