The world is rapidly changing.
Mike Novogratz, the long time crypto advocate, came out with something that I long espoused. AI agents are going to be the primary payment vehicles in the future and they are not going to have bank accounts.
He stated the largest users of stablecoins in the not-so-distant future will be AI agents. This is actually aligning with the dead internet theory, something Sam Altman recently commented on.
AI is changing everything. It is time for us to really start embracing what is happening. Our world will be completely different in 5 years. The situation with who is making payment is just one example.
AI Agents Will Be The Biggest Users Of Stablecoins
The future is a world of agents for everything. It is probable that individuals are able to spin up whatever agent is required.
Remember when the mantra was learn to code. That is now as obsolete as being a rotary phone repairman.
Brian Armstrong is the latest CEO to publicly embrace AI for coding. He is now pushing Coinbase to have 50% of its code written by AI come October. This is just another example of where major corporations are increasing their output through this tool.
At some point, the ease of use by these platforms will be such that people can design their own code. With the advancement of LLMs, it is likely that we simply will be able to voice command what we want and the software will generate it.
This brings us to the point of our grocery app:
Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz said that AI agents will soon become the top users of stablecoins.
During an interview with Bloomberg published on Wednesday, Novogratz said that “in the not-so-distant future, the biggest user of stablecoins is going to be AI.” He said he expects users will be able to ask an AI to buy their groceries, and have it independently engage in the necessary transactions:
”Your grocery agent, who knows what you like to eat, knows that you’re on a diet or not on a diet, is going to figure out what groceries to buy from where.”
For those who think this is far-fetched, consider the fact that we see the foundation for each of these in place. We have LLMs advancing. Agents are being generated, improving with each generation. Stablecoins are spreading with the passage of legislation and the entry of new firms into the market.
Novogratz deems this a foregone conclusion. In other words, it is a matter of when, not if.
Novogratz highlighted that such an agent would not “send a wire instruction or a Venmo” and instead would rely on stablecoin transactions. He said that he is unaware of whether such systems will be in place in one or five years, but he expects us to “see an explosion of stablecoin transactions.”
Automated Economy
The reality is that, whether anyone wants it or not, we are moving towards an automated economy. Computers are becoming "smarter", capable of handling more aspects of society.
Over the last few decade, processing was the major component to societal advancement. Now, we are seeing cognition on the rise. This means that grocery shopping is soon to be an outdated concept, at least from the human perspective.
Consider the fact that a percentage of the population already buys their food using applications. Many such as Walmart, Kroger, and Publix (in the US) will deliver the groceries to one's door.
How much of a leap is it for the application to do the ordering without human intervention?
The answer to this question is where the uncertainty of time reside. Nevertheless, it is likely less than 5 years.
Taking this idea a bit further, consider a robot to be nothing more than an embedded AI agent.
We are seeing network support for this already starting.
Autonomous agents — AI-powered programs that can think and transact without human input — may unlock a new world of e-commerce on Ethereum due to a largely forgotten HTTP web standard that has only recently been leveraged on the blockchain.
The dormant HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status — defined 30 years ago — together with Ethereum Improvement Proposal 3009, enables AI agents to make stablecoin transfers without human intervention, the Ethereum Foundation said on Wednesday, sharing a “guest thread” written by Coinbase development team members Kevin Leffew and Lincoln Murr.
This means building for humans is a mistake. The future is AI agents and developers, along with entrepreneurs, need to understand this.
The shift could be transformative because AI agents can now autonomously access funds to pay for services, eliminating the need for human intervention in managing API calls, storage or computation.
This will be the deciding factor between a platform thriving or dying. Those which focus primarily on human interaction, unless very niche, will find difficulty. It is the agents which will be in operation.
As for the economy, it is as if we create billions of people. Companies will exist that are nothing more than agents. Websites will disappear as agents can pull the data directly from the API.
We saw a massive change when the Internet was introduced and starting to become mainstream. AI agents will have, at minimum, the same impact (if not more).
The time to grasp this is now.