Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the artificial intelligence (AI) megatrend makes crypto more important, not less.

He argued that AI agents will become the largest transacting users of crypto rails, meaning the software programs that act autonomously on behalf of people and businesses could soon move more value across blockchains than any other category of user.

How Could AI Make Crypto More Important? 

In a post on X, Armstrong rejected the advice that people in crypto should pivot to AI. He called that framing zero-sum scarcity thinking — the assumption that attention and capital flowing toward one technology must be drained away from another. In his view, the two trends are complementary rather than competing.

The reasoning rests on how AI agents actually operate. As these systems begin to buy data, pay for computing power, subscribe to services and settle transactions with one another, they need a form of money that is native to software: programmable, available around the clock, and usable without opening a traditional bank account. Legacy payment networks were built for humans clicking checkout buttons, not for machines negotiating and settling thousands of micro-payments per second.

Crypto rails — the blockchain networks and stablecoins that let value move directly between digital wallets — fit that requirement closely. They are permissionless, meaning an agent does not have to ask a bank to open an account, and they support very small, near-instant transfers. If autonomous agents multiply across the economy, the volume of machine-to-machine payments could dwarf today’s human-driven crypto activity.

For an exchange like Coinbase, that outlook is strategically important. It suggests that infrastructure serving AI agents — wallets, identity, settlement and on-ramps between traditional money and crypto — may become a major growth area rather than a niche. It also reframes the broader debate: instead of AI making digital assets obsolete, Armstrong sees the AI wave enlarging the addressable market for crypto payments.

The argument is not without open questions. Regulatory treatment of autonomous agents transacting in crypto remains unsettled, and issues such as fraud, accountability and consumer protection grow more complex when software, rather than a person, initiates a payment. Still, the core thesis is clear: as machines become economic actors, they will need money that is as programmable as they are, and Armstrong is betting that crypto is best positioned to be that money.

Source: BeInCrypto