![\"Opus](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1782320891_161_0x0.jpg\")
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Close-up of a person’s hand holding a smartphone and using the Opus 4 model within the Claude app from AI company Anthropic, Lafayette, California, May 22, 2025. (Photo by Smith Collection\/Gado\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
Gado via Getty Images<\/p>\n
“Is an agent gonna be able to open a bank account? Is is JP Morgan gonna open an account for an agent? Probably not gonna happen, right?” Yat Siu asked on the On The Margin podcast. “So how do they do that? They have a wallet.”<\/p>\n
That question is the whole argument. Siu, the co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, thinks the biggest future users of blockchain will not be people speculating on tokens. They will be software. And he is already running a fleet of it. “I have two hundred and eighty agents now doing all sorts of stuff,” he said.<\/p>\n
Ask him what they actually do and the answer is mundane in a way that makes the point. “There’s like probably 50 of them doing some stuff, you know,” he said. One scans X for trending code repositories and checks whether they are real. Another is a grocery bot. “I have a food, I have a food price arbitrage sort of agent,” Siu said. “It turns out that you know eggs can be up to 150% arbitrage from one supermarket to the other because of some special or because of some something.” The limit, in his telling, is not the technology. “The only thing is that’s limiting is kind of your imagination,” he said.<\/p>\n
Why the rails have to be crypto<\/p>\n
For an agent to do any of that on its own, it needs money, and that is where the banking system stops being an option<\/a>. “We actually think you know agents with wallets essentially become autonomous economic actors who then basically do not just trade but buy and do stuff,” Siu said. A wallet gives a piece of software the one thing a bank will not: an account it can hold and spend from without a human filling in a form.<\/p>\n Chandler Fang, founder of t54 Labs, said on the On The Margin podcast that “our entire financial ecosystem was primarily human-centric.” A former Ripple and JPMorgan executive now building a trust layer for agent payments, Fang thinks dollar-pegged tokens<\/a> are what software will reach for. A stablecoin, he said, is “a very, very friendly way, right? Or very AI native way” for one machine to pay another.<\/p>\n Nitya Subramanian, the founder of wallet firm Para, said on the On The Margin podcast that “wallets are ultimately the authorization and control flow layer of anything that’s happening on chain.” What that buys an owner is a leash. “I could create a stable coin backed card and give it $200 a week and just have it buy Chipotle,” Subramanian said. “So it’s only allowed to buy my Chipotle bowl every day.”<\/p>\n Siu says his own agents are already out there spending and trading. “They can use a stablecoin,” he said. “We already have agents that are trading on hyperliquid. We also have agents that can trade on polymarket, for instance. That’s all happening right now.”<\/p>\n The scale Siu is betting on<\/p>\n Then come the numbers, which are his own forecast rather than anything you can measure today. Count a few agents per person across the online world, he said, and “you’re gonna have anywhere from 50 to 100 billion agents minimum.” His mental model for them is less Skynet than video game. “The way that I think of the agents is little bit like your own Sims,” Siu said. “Every agent has a personality and they kind of do stuff. It’s like a game, except they have real world outcomes.”<\/p>\n Where that bites first, he argues, is the advertising-funded web. People no longer click. “Two years ago we clicked through everything,” Siu said. “Now search gives us a category. We look at it and we say, good enough.” Website traffic for many publishers is down 80%, he said, so the only way they get paid is to charge the machines that read them. “The total advertising, online advertising revenues is around $900 billion a year,” Siu said. “That’s all gonna shift into a kind of transactional invocation economy powered by agents.” Global all-media ad spending crossed $1 trillion in 2025, so his order of magnitude holds even if the figure is rich for digital alone.<\/p>\n Varun Kabra, chief growth officer at Concordium, said on the On The Margin podcast that agents are already starting to “pay for things, they sign up for services, they probably handle your financial transactions now.” His timeline is short. “We’re probably six to twelve months away where these transactions might overtake the human to human transactions,” Kabra said. The catch, he added, is that the counterparty “has no way to verify where a real accountable human is behind the transaction.”<\/p>\n Wall Street is already building the rails<\/p>\n The incumbents are not waiting<\/a> for the philosophy to settle, and Siu reads their scramble as self-defense. “That’s why they’re trying to build agents of their own, because they don’t want to lose their customers, right?” he said. Coinbase’s x402, an open standard for stablecoin payments launched in 2025, counted roughly 69,000 active AI agents and more than 165 million transactions as of April 2026, with Stripe, Visa, Circle and Cloudflare among its backers. Visa rolled out a Trusted Agent Protocol in late 2025. In June 2026 Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines with more than 30 partners including Coinbase and Adyen. Skyfire, founded by former Ripple executives, raised $9.5 million from Coinbase Ventures and a16z to hand agents USDC wallets. “So that’s kind of the fight that everyone is in right now,” Siu said.<\/p>\n For Siu, the agent bet is the latest turn of a much older one. “It wasn’t Bitcoin that attracted us to blockchain,” he said. What pulled Animoca in was digital property rights<\/a>, the idea that a person could truly own and move a digital good, and he now extends it to the agents themselves. Each “mind,” he argues, should be something its owner holds, not rents. “The NFT is yours. And all the data is stored there,” Siu said. Animoca, which he co-founded in 2014 and which hit a roughly $5.9 billion valuation at the 2022 peak, has spent 2026 pushing AI agents, stablecoins and DePIN alongside its games.<\/p>\n