Why AI Needs Its Own Money

We talked last week about how the internet is being rebuilt for machines.

This is the inevitable result of our software getting smarter. AI agents can now write code, manage workflows and execute complex tasks without constant supervision. They can even hire people to do work for them in the physical world that they can’t do themselves.

But if machines are going to work, hire and transact online… how exactly will they pay?

After all, credit cards and bank accounts were built for human transactions. And billing cycles were built around our payroll calendars.

That model doesn’t fit in a world where software runs 24 hours a day and makes thousands of decisions per minute.

If the internet is being rebuilt for machines, then its payment rails have to change too.

As we’ve been documenting here in the Daily Disruptor, that change is already underway.

And in the process, I’m convinced it will legitimize stablecoins as the payment system that the next version of the internet actually needs.

The Stablecoin Use Case

Since their inception, stablecoins have often been dismissed as a solution in search of a problem.

Today, that argument is getting harder to defend.

In 2025, stablecoins moved $33 trillion across public blockchains.

That’s nearly 20X larger than PayPal’s annual volume and more than double what Visa processes in a year.

Now, that doesn’t mean consumers are buying groceries with USDC today. A big chunk of that volume comes from trading and settlement inside crypto markets.

But volume is volume. It means these payment rails are scaling.

And the balance sheet behind those rails keeps growing too. There’s now roughly $280 to $300 billion in stablecoins outstanding. Tether alone sits north of $180 billion, and USDC is over $70 billion.

But it’s not just crypto exchanges anymore.

Visa is settling transactions in USDC. Stripe supports stablecoin payouts across dozens of countries. And BlackRock launched a tokenized money market fund on-chain that quickly crossed the $500 million mark.

That tells you where this is headed.

I’ve long argued that tokenization is inevitable because markets tend to choose the system that’s faster and cheaper.

If ownership can move instantly instead of in two days, that’s better. If assets can trade without layers of intermediaries taking a cut, that’s a clear improvement.

Now let’s apply that same logic to machines.

An AI agent doesn’t want to wait two days for settlement. It doesn’t want to absorb 3% in card fees just to move money. And it certainly doesn’t want to ask permission every time it needs compute.

It wants programmable money.

And stablecoins are programmable money.

They settle in seconds. They clear 24 hours a day. And they support micropayments measured in fractions of a cent.

That’s exactly what Web 4.0 needs to enable machine-to-machine transactions.

The scale of this opportunity is enormous.

Global cloud infrastructure spending exceeded $400 billion last year and continues to grow at double-digit rates.

And the SaaS market is roughly a $300 billion industry built almost entirely around human seats and monthly subscriptions.

But what happens when a growing share of demand isn’t human anymore?

A person might pay $50 a month for software and log in a few times a day.

But an AI system could be calling a service every second. It might need to buy computing power for a few minutes, then stop. It might pay tiny amounts of money over and over again throughout the day.

Instead of one monthly bill, it could make thousands of small payments.

That’s what Web 4.0 is being built for. Instead of waiting for approval, software would just send money whenever it needs to. No humans required.

That’s a very different kind of customer.

If even 5% to 10% of cloud and SaaS spending shifts toward machine-native, real-time micro-settlement, that represents tens of billions of dollars flowing through programmable rails instead of card networks.

And that’s just software.

Gartner projects that by 2030, AI agents could directly influence roughly $18 trillion in purchases as machine customers become a significant force in the economy.

Even if that forecast proves aggressive, you can see where this is going.

Machines will increasingly participate directly in commerce. And when they do, they’ll favor the rails that match their behavior.

That’s why investors need to pay attention now.

Because tokenization isn’t just about putting stocks and bonds on the blockchain. It’s about redesigning the transaction layer of the internet for automation and autonomy.

Stablecoins are the first large-scale proof that programmable settlement works.

And AI agents could be the force that truly pushes them into the mainstream.

Here’s My Take

We’re about to find out what stablecoins are really for: a world where software is the customer.

Over the next five years, I expect the economics will demand that many more major cloud platforms add stablecoin settlement options for machine accounts.

This will cause pricing models to change. Instead of monthly subscriptions, more services will move to usage-based billing, simply because machines won’t tolerate flat fees when they can optimize in real time.

And once that happens, the companies that control programmable dollars could start to matter more than the companies that control credit card networks.

In that world, stablecoins won’t feel experimental anymore.

They’ll become absolutely necessary.

Regards,

Ian KingChief Strategist, Banyan Hill Publishing

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