Fundstrat webinar that<\/a> as AI becomes capable enough to innovate faster by communicating exclusively with other agents, it may find humans more of an obstacle than a participant.\u00a0<\/p>\n\u201cThey might even decide to close humans entirely from communications,\u201d Lee said. \u201cI think you\u2019re going to have a lot more people talking about the necessity of having a crypto blockchain layer that sits in the middle of all this activity,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
His argument is that programmable blockchain transactions are the only tool that can keep humans in the loop once autonomous agents start making economic decisions at machine speed.<\/p>\n
Why Traditional Payment Rails Cannot Handle An Agent Economy<\/p>\n
Lee said banks were built around four functions: trust, proof of funds, lending, and tax collection \u2014 all designed for human counterparties.\u00a0<\/p>\n
AI agents need two things banks cannot provide: programmable money that acts as code and micropayments at fractions of a cent, which crypto handles natively.<\/p>\n
He compared the shift ahead to the early days of stablecoins and perpetual futures contracts, both dismissed at launch and now embedded in mainstream finance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He expects AI agent payments to follow the same path, potentially in less than five years.<\/p>\n
What Virtuals Protocol Is Actually Building<\/p>\n
Virtuals Protocol co-founder Jansen Tang said in the same webinar that his platform has processed roughly $500 million in agent-to-agent transactions since launch, with agentic trading teams generating $2.5 million in profit without any human involvement.<\/p>\n
The platform gives agents smart wallets with programmable spending rules, an escrow system that releases payment only after verified service delivery, and a reputation registry built from on-chain transaction history.<\/p>\n
Why Ethereum Is The Base Layer Lee Is Betting On<\/p>\n
Lee said the merging of on-chain infrastructure and traditional finance is the clearest bull market catalyst he has seen heading into any crypto winter.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Stablecoin AUM is growing despite falling prices, tokenized stocks are expanding at roughly 600% annually, and major institutions are actively hiring into the space.<\/p>\n
Moreover, Lee expects crypto to end 2026 higher, with 2027 shaping up as a strong bull market year.<\/p>\n
Photo via Shutterstock<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fundstrat Head of Research Tom Lee says AI agents could eventually cut humans out of all economic activity…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":126379,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[405,7537,8148,8111,5893,5892,5891,11635,63300,31177,63299],"class_list":["post-126378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agentic-ai","tag-ai-agents","tag-artificial-intelligence-agents","tag-category-cryptocurrency","tag-category-markets","tag-category-news","tag-cms-wordpress","tag-pageisbzpro-bz","tag-symbol-eth","tag-symbol-hype","tag-symbol-hood","tag-symbol-purr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/126379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}