Fifty to one hundred billion AI agents. That is Yat Siu’s estimate of how many autonomous machine actors he expects to be transacting on the internet over the next few years. Siu, co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands, is not hedging. “The future of the web is heavily agentic,” he said in a video interview. “Everything will be done by agents.”
This is not theoretical for Animoca. The company pivoted from virtual worlds to an AI-driven metaverse in May and announced an investment program of up to $10 million for developers building applications on its AI agent platform, Minds. Siu’s argument is that the metaverse may no longer be somewhere people go. Instead, AI agents could handle bookings, payments, scheduling and commerce in the background on their behalf.
That leaves a fundamental question for Animoca and the wider industry: what will those agents use to pay each other?
“There will be an AI currency coming,” said Erald Ghoos, CEO of OKX Europe, in a video interview. “This is not going to be fiat, for sure. It will be a stablecoin or some other crypto token, whatever this is going to be, that is going to be by far, by far the largest currency that this world has ever seen.”
He predicted that there would be one “super currency” coming specifically for AI agents. “It could be a stablecoin, or it could be something else. Let’s see what works.”
Siu agrees that agents will need crypto-based money rather than conventional bank accounts. Stablecoins, perhaps, he added. For sure, not bank accounts, because AI agents can’t open them yet, at least. Traditional payment systems require human identity verification.
“To make an agent truly autonomous, you need a way for them to use and own money,” he said. “A crypto wallet would seem the most obvious way. It’s going to be a long while before any bank opens a bank account for an AI agent. Crypto basically solves all of that. Crypto is the perfect machine banking system.”
Where Siu and Ghoos differ is in whether agents will converge on a single dominant currency. Siu does not necessarily see one settlement currency taking over. He said agents could transact across thousands of tokens without forcing the human owner to make sense of each one. “The agent knows what to do,” he said. “The human never has to focus his attention on a thousand tokens.”