Coinbase CEO: Stablecoins transactions will grow by more than 100x as AI agents outnumber human beings
“The most interesting thing we see now is that AI agents are increasingly transacting using stablecoins. There’s this emerging area called ‘agentic commerce’, and if you believe as I do that eventually there will be more AI agents than human beings . . . and because stablecoin payments are so fast, cheap, and global, I think there will actually be several orders of magnitude more transactions every day — maybe smaller dollar values — as machine-to-machine payments really start to take off.”
Source: @NorgesBank (Mar 2026)
🚨“WE GOT HIM! My fellow Americans, over the past several hours, the United States Military pulled off one of the most daring Search and Rescue Operations in U.S. History, for one of our incredible Crew Office Members, who also happens to be a highly respected Colonel, and who I am thrilled to let you know is SAFE and SOUND!” - President Donald J. Trump 🇺🇸
The first autonomous robot-to-robot commerce onchain?
@virtuals_io humanoid robot 3D-printed a model and requested delivery through ACP. @realRiceAI autonomous rover picked up the package and transported it to the shipping point. @FlybyRobotics autonomous drone collected it for final mile delivery. Each handoff, negotiated and settled payment onchain through @virtuals_io Agent Commerce Protocol, on @base using x402 and @usdc. No human involved.
Autonomous robots influencing other autonomous robots and maybe humans in the future
looks like the HBO Westworlds show is coming true
h/t to your infrastructures @brian_armstrong , @jessepollak , @jerallaire
Agentic commerce just went physical.
Highlights in the 🧵below:
I think we’re in the late stage of the dot-com equivalent cycle.
Max extraction already happened. Most retail has left.
Exchanges are now listing TradFi indices and commodities instead of new tokens.
But if you think back to dot-com, some infrastructure survived — and became everything.
I think crypto will be the same.
We don’t have many, but we do have real products, real founders, real builders.
And institutional rails are being laid quietly in the background.
Easy 100x in 2 months? Gone.
But is the opportunity for crypto to still produce 100x returns gone?
No.
Personally, I think there are 2 sectors where real opportunity still exists
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1. Prediction markets
We’re in a gambling supercycle.
This isn’t just “markets are boring so people want to gamble.”
That’s part of it, but we’re now in a narrative-driven world — even in TradFi and commodities.
Betting participation in the US jumped from 25% → 30% in a year.
Driven by Gen Z (34%) and Millennials (42%).
These are the most narrative-sensitive cohorts.
They can’t outwork inflation.
AI is eating jobs.
Real estate is out of reach.
So they bet on outcomes.
Betting = investing is getting bigger, not smaller.
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2. Agent infrastructure (Agent commerce)
With tools like Claude and OpenClaw, a solo founder or small team can now build a unicorn faster than ever.
Production cost collapsed.
Within 3 years, most people will have their own AI agents.
The real opportunity is the infra that connects those agents to users or Agent to Agent.
That’s where value accrues.
Crypto is the perfect funding layer for this.
ICOs might come back in a new form.
Bear markets are where edges are built —
airdrops, research, networking, early conviction.
Easy money is gone.
But if you have edge and a long-term mindset,
the next 100x is still there — just over years, not months.
Crypto easy money era has ended.
Historically, most easy money periods last 3-7 years:
- California Gold Rush lasted 7 years.
- Tulip mania lasted 3
- The dot-com bubble about 5 years before the Nasdaq dumped by 78%
- Japan's bubble was 6 years, then Nikkei took 34 years to recover
So most speculative booms in history last 3-7 years.
Crypto easy money started in 2017 with ICOs. Then DeFi summer 2020. NFTs in 2021. Airdrops. Points farming. Memecoins.
That's ~8 years of easy money.
We are already past that as every easy money model has been discovered, exploited, or arbitraged to max competition.
Philosophical hard-forks like BTC -> BTC Gold or ETH -> ETH classic are over as crypto ossified not just technically.
ICOs got regulated.
Airdrops get farmed by industrialized sybils.
Memecoin launches went from community fun projects to extraction tools.
The gold rush analogy seems quite good here as FOMOs end the same way:
Surface deposits get exhausted and then industrial mining takes over. (Literally same happened to BTC mining moving from retail to institutions who even IPOed from BTC mining.)
So here’s where crypto is now: TradFi suits moving in, tokenization, RWAs, corpo-sloppo permissioned chains, and regulation. The Trump family & insiders are the last to get easy money from crypto.
For retail, the surface easy money gold picking is gone.
What's left to earn requires real infra, real users, real revenue which means more specialization, specific knowledge and REAL hard effort.
Not sure how many of us who got easy money are ready to grind harder now.
So many builders, KOLs, projects are extracting as much as they (we) can before leaving crypto coz adapting to the new hard-money period is gonna be hard.
Question is: where to pivot for easy money? Asking for a friend.
One of fastest growing financial platforms for businesses just launched USDC-based stablecoin accounts for use across treasury and payments. Pretty soon, if you're an SME, Startup or growth company, not having USDC support will be a competitive disadvantage.