We normally think about a digital wallet belonging to a person. But what happens when the person using the wallet isn’t a person at all?
Imagine telling your AI assistant: ‘find me the cheapest flight to New York, book the hotel, renew my insurance and pay my electricity bill.‘
AI can increasingly find the information and make the decisions. But to genuinely act on your behalf, it needs something else. It needs money.
And that is where digital wallets and stablecoins could become particularly interesting.
An AI agent can’t use money in quite the same way we do. Traditional payments were built around people, bank accounts, cards and manual approvals. On the other hand, Blockchain networks were built for value to move digitally, and increasingly, programmatically.
We’re already starting to see it happen.
Coinbase’s x402 payment standard allows AI agents and online services to automatically make payments over the internet, including using stablecoins such as USDC. Coinbase and AWS have already been working on infrastructure that allows websites and services to accept payments directly from AI agents.
Just last week, 8.7 million x402 stablecoin transfers were recorded, more than double the previous week.
The value being transferred remains relatively small, suggesting much of this activity is tiny machine-to-machine payments rather than AI agents suddenly going on shopping sprees. But that’s almost the point.
An AI might need to pay a fraction of a penny for some data, another small amount to use an API, and another to access computing power. Instead of humans taking out subscriptions and manually approving every transaction, machines could potentially pay other machines as and when they need something.
Give an AI a wallet, some digital money and carefully defined spending permissions, and suddenly it doesn’t just answer questions. It can transact.
The future of digital wallets therefore might not simply be about self-custody. It could also be about delegated custody. Deciding how much financial freedom we’re prepared to give our machines.
For years, we’ve talked about bringing the next billion people into digital assets. Perhaps some of the next billion wallets won’t belong to people at all. They’ll belong to AI.