Quicknode Co-Founder: Blockchain Is The Brawn Behind Agentic AI, Not The Brain – Coinbase Global (NASDAQ: – Benzinga<\/p>\n
\u201cThe bottleneck for autonomous agents isn\u2019t intelligence, it\u2019s money movement,\u201d said Quicknode co-founder Dmitry Shklovsky. \u201cAn agent can reason its way to a decision, but it can\u2019t open a bank account or get issued a card to act on it. Blockchain isn\u2019t the brain. It\u2019s the wallet, and that\u2019s the part we handle.”<\/p>\n
According to Quicknode, autonomous AI agents will need a way to buy data, compute power and digital services without human approval. That makes stablecoins a natural settlement layer for machine-to-machine commerce.<\/p>\n
The Quicknode segment of the blockchain economy connects AI with the stablecoin and payment infrastructure narrative investors are paying attention to.<\/p>\n
Quicknode\u2019s job is essentially to spare developers from having to run and maintain their own blockchain nodes. Instead, developers pay them for access to blockchain data and transaction routing through APIs known as RPC (Remote Procedure Call) <\/a>endpoints.<\/p>\n Agentic Payments: The Emerging Landscape<\/p>\n Chainalysis frames digital assets, led by stablecoins, as “new rails” rather than as speculative assets for investors. These are the rails being built today.<\/p>\n Their 2026 The New Rails <\/a>report says agentic payments are creating a new layer of onchain economic activity. Their analysis places infrastructure vendors inside the broader digitization of future finance rather than as a niche AI-crypto theme.<\/p>\n $1.9 Trillion In Transactions By 2030<\/p>\n The center of gravity for cryptocurrency investors is clearly moving away from altcoins and no-use-case meme coins. Crypto is all about stablecoin and payment settlement, tokenized assets and machine-triggered commerce.\u00a0<\/p>\n Even stablecoins and the infrastructure build out narrative can be ladened with hype.<\/p>\n The writer of this article owns Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana. Artwork created by the author via Canva.<\/p>\n Benzinga Disclaimer: This article is from an unpaid external contributor. It does not represent Benzinga\u2019s reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.<\/p>\n Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a9 2026 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Investors are placing almost all of their attention on artificial intelligence. The AI story is focused on private companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, with investors waiting for their IPO days.<\/a> AI is dominated by traditional markets and Big Tech players. Blockchain infrastructure provider Quicknode thinks there are other opportunities out there in this space \u2013 most of it for private capital. The next phase of AI may depend less on intelligence and more on stablecoin payment architecture.<\/p>\n Blockchain isn\u2019t the brains of this entire AI operation; but it can be the brawn. That brawn \u2013 the muscle \u2013 is stablecoin payment infrastructure, led by digital wallets and payment protocols. The companies behind these systems are not looking to be household names like Claude, but much of the new agentic AI tech <\/a>for finance might not survive without them.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s financial architecture assumes a human with a legal identity, a bank account, and a credit or debit card is approving each payment. An AI agent cannot simply open a Stripe account or get issued a Visa card. Payment protocols like Coinbase\u2019s (NASDAQ:<\/a>COIN<\/a>) x402 uses the HTTP 402 \u201cPayment Required\u201d status code. An AI agent makes an ordinary web request via x402, gets asked to pay, pays from a digital wallet, and the transaction is settled by the AI agent for you.\u00a0<\/p>\n “The reason you do this on a blockchain is because it\u2019s the only payment network that is programmable, global, always on, and economical at sub-cent value for transactions,” said Shklovsky. “That\u2019s the gap card networks and bank transfers leave open. A fraction-of-a-cent payment isn\u2019t economical to them. Stablecoin settlement is what makes it work for us. That\u2019s the category we\u2019re focused on \u2013 the money an agent moves as a normal part of operating.”<\/p>\n Other companies in this space include Alchemy, Infura, Chainstack and Ankr. Without them, developers would have to operate their own full Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH)<\/a>, Solana (CRYPTO: SOL)<\/a>, Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC)<\/a>, or Base (by Coinbase) node, which is expensive and technically challenging.<\/p>\n The company counts QED Investors, Tiger Global, 10T Holdings, Seven Seven Six and Protocol Labs as investors. Quicknode was an early launch partner for Circle <\/a>(NASDAQ:<\/a>CRCL<\/a>) Nanopayments, a stablecoin settlement system that handles sub-cent settlement. The Quicknode gamble is a bet on the future of stablecoin transactions; more AI agents; and more demand for fintech architecture.<\/p>\n Deloitte predicted<\/a> in May that stablecoin-enabled retail purchases could exceed $200 billion in the U.S. by 2030. Deloitte identified agentic commerce as a catalyst because stablecoins can sit in pre-authorized wallets and move on 24\/7 programmable rails in ways that reduce friction for autonomous agents to conduct financial transactions.\u00a0<\/p>\n In this case, “a developer can give their agent a wallet to control and they don\u2019t have to become a blockchain expert to do so,” said Shklovsky.\u00a0 “The eventual buyers are cloud providers, data vendors, SaaS companies, and payment companies. They will all settle machine-to-machine payments the same way because no other rail handles software-initiated, high-frequency, global, sub-cent payments,” he said. “The use case isn\u2019t crypto. It\u2019s an agent buying compute, paying for a data feed, or settling with another company\u2019s agent. The thing that moves is a stablecoin, and the buyer doesn\u2019t need to care that it clears onchain. Our role is the infrastructure underneath.”<\/p>\n Citi now models $1.9 trillion in stablecoin issuance by 2030 <\/a>in its base case scenario. Their bull case posits some $4 trillion in issuance, with roughly $100 trillion of transaction activity.\u00a0Deloitte, meanwhile, argues that stablecoin-enabled retail flows alone could exceed $200 billion in U.S. retail purchases by 2030. Agentic AI commerce was explicitly cited as a growth driver. As stablecoin payments grow, demand for the rails that settle those transactions will grow, too. It\u2019s not the whole story.<\/p>\n “The larger pattern is that real economic activity is moving onchain,” said Shklovsky.\u00a0 “Each activity brings its own demand, be it from trading firms that lose money when data is too slow, or teams replacing fragile in-house data pipelines with something that doesn\u2019t break during a reorganization or now we have autonomous agents that need to read, transact, and pay on their own. Stablecoins, AI agents, and tokenization aren\u2019t separate trends competing for investor attention. They\u2019re the same shift \u2013 we have software and institutions doing real things onchain instead of people speculating in coins,” he said.<\/p>\n A 2025 report<\/a> by Artemis, Castle Island Ventures, and Dragonfly showed that known stablecoin payment firms were running at a $72.3 billion annualized payment pace in February 2025, later rising to an approximately $118 billion annualized pace by August 2025 in their fall update. In other words: this is a real segment. It is growing fast, but is still smaller than the broad “stablecoin volume” narrative suggests.\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, the strongest market signal is that this market is no longer a pure \u201ccrypto-native\u201d playground. The Linux Foundation launched<\/a> the x402 Foundation in April 2026, with support from<\/a> AWS, American Express, Circle, Coinbase, Shopify, Stripe and others. That member list is meaningful. It means that major cloud and payments companies see agent-native payment protocols as strategically important.<\/p>\n Powered by Benzinga Newsdesk<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Quicknode Co-Founder: Blockchain Is The Brawn Behind Agentic AI, Not The Brain – Coinbase Global (NASDAQ: – Benzinga…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":83105,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[179,7493,8148,8734,15987,9181,5896,5892,5891,8149,11635,11636,8417,41147,9186],"class_list":["post-83104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agentic-ai","tag-agentic-ai","tag-agentic-artificial-intelligence","tag-category-cryptocurrency","tag-category-general","tag-category-interview","tag-category-opinion","tag-category-tech","tag-cms-wordpress","tag-pageisbzpro-bz","tag-symbol-btc","tag-symbol-eth","tag-symbol-sol","tag-symbol-coin","tag-symbol-crcl","tag-tag-contributors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83104","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=83104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}