暗号資産業界、AI エージェントを新たなユーザー層として開拓へ

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For years, the crypto industry’s biggest challenge has been finding users beyond traders. Now, some of its largest companies think they’ve found them in AI agents.

Although speculation still underpins much of crypto’s business, companies are trying to build a second growth engine by turning agents into users of crypto wallets, stablecoins and payment networks.

For example, this summer, Kraken said it’s rebuilding its app to be able to give users access to AI agents capable of continuously monitoring markets, identifying investing opportunities and executing trades in real time. Coinbase launched a new tool that will allow agents like ChatGPT or Claude to execute crypto trades using natural language instructions. And in May, Circle announced a strategic expansion with its home-grown Arc blockchain, which is designed to be infrastructure for the agentic economy, where AI agents handle more of the operational and contractual work currently managed by humans.

The bet marks a big shift for an industry that has spent much of the past decade trying to convince consumers that crypto would be a better form of money than traditional currencies, or a more efficient way to move it than traditional transaction rails. AI agents may be the first users that naturally need what crypto was built to provide, the thinking goes. Unlike humans, agents are built to operate online, which makes digital wallets, programmable money and always-on payment networks more of a technical requirement than a behavioral shift.

“Anyone [can] have an isolated account inside their main Coinbase app that they can just give to an agent,” Lincoln Murr, AI product lead at Coinbase, told CNBC of the new Coinbase for Agents experience. “You can imagine this doing all sorts of things on your behalf – whether it’s trading or rebalancing a portfolio to your specifications, whether it’s paying for premium information like access to S1 funds to help you make trading decisions. The whole idea is to give agents access to money, and through that financial independence, improve their set of capabilities to pretty much anything on the internet.”

Crypto’s bridge to AI

The overlap between crypto and AI has pushed stablecoins, the more practical back-office players that have historically kept the crypto casino running, to the front of the conversation.

Unlike bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, which have fluctuating prices, stablecoins are designed to maintain a fixed value and are thus widely viewed as more practical for payments. And because they can move around the clock and be programmed directly into software, they offer infrastructure that AI agents can use without relying on banks or card networks.

“Conventional banking systems are really poorly suited to realtime agent-to-agent, machine-to-machine commerce,” said Joseph Chalom, CEO of the ether treasury firm Sharplink. “The reason why this is becoming a bit of a crypto story is not that the primary thing that’s going to be exchanged is crypto. It’s just at the end of the day, stablecoins and smart contracts allow AI agents to send payments and settle transactions … automatically, without requiring human oversight.”

Circle has leaned into that opportunity by marketing its flagship USDC stablecoin as programmable digital dollars for internet-native payments. AI agents represent a new source of transaction volume for the company, tied less to crypto trading and more to everyday software activity. However, the stablecoin race has been heating up since the passing of the GENIUS Act a year ago, and as a result, traditional financial firms increasingly want to issue their own stablecoins rather than relying on third-party issuers like Circle.

Jeremy Allaire, Circle’s CEO, said adoption of the company’s new Arc blockchain for agentic activity “drives the adoption of our stablecoin network [and] will continue to expand the network effects we have,” which will help grow the amount of USDC as well as the transactional activity related to it and the monetization of it.

“Banks that want to build tokenized deposits can build on top of Arc, and they can create and redeem that using USDC as the globally interoperable rail, so there are ways for us to work with and alongside all these different players,” Allaire added.

Less speculation, more sophistication

This part of crypto’s evolution also comes in the middle of a crypto bear market, where the price of bitcoin has been sitting more than 40% off its October peak and speculative money has been chasing hotter opportunities like the tech IPO market, predictions markets and perpetual futures. Bitcoin’s popularity among the world’s biggest institutions has also translated into lower volatility for the flagship cryptocurrency on both the upside and the downside.

Couple the price inaction with the fact that crypto exchanges are focused not only on financial infrastructure over trading, but expanding their tradable assets and financial services offerings beyond cryptocurrencies – to equities and commodities trading as well as payments, banking and lending.

Whether new agent demand materializes remains to be seen, but if nothing else, the introduction of agentic trading to help sharpen investing decisions could mark a new level of maturity for the industry, pulling it further away from the wild west days of crypto.

“The barrier to building more intelligence and trading strategies for the average user [is] lowering” with agentic trading, said Cameron Winklevoss, president of crypto exchange Gemini. “It used to be that [if you’re not] retail, you’re a heavily capitalized high frequency trader or proprietary trading firm – there is an ocean between that and the average retail user … and that ocean narrows quite a bit.”

That’s a bet Kraken is making with its new agentic trading experience, hoping it will “unlock a lot of access, a lot of engagement from everyday people” in addition to its core user base of institutions, trading firms and professional traders.

“The fun casino days of bitcoin are over,” said Kamo Asatryan, chief data officer at Kraken. “There’s opportunity to really discuss with AI – regarding any given asset that you’re interested in – what it means for you … whether that’s bitcoin or a random meme coin or even an equity.”

“You still see volatility with prices,” he added, “but as you get more utility built into the general financial ecosystem, that volatility goes away more and more. It’s never going to disappear, but it’ll be less jagged.”