Autonomous AI “agents” will transact using crypto in the future. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong argued in an interview with Decrypt.
“In the future, there will be more and more AI agents, which are basically bots trying to do different things in the world,” Armstrong said.
Those agents need to make transactions to pay for services like data and API calls, he added. “It's hard to imagine a world where different AI agents are paid with Visa or something like that,” Armstrong said, adding that they could use “a digital native currency like crypto.”
Armstrong suggests that the “intersection where AI and crypto can come together” could throw up other use cases, such as establishing data integrity.
“In the world of fake information generated by LLMs or images or videos of people that can go viral, even if it's not real, I think crypto has a role to play there,” Armstrong said. Video, images and articles can be encrypted by publishers' ENS containers, he suggests, ensuring they come from an authentic source, such as a known author or news organization.
Coinbase is using AI tools in areas such as fraud prevention, customer support and other support services, Armstrong said. “We use something like Copilot to help our developers write code.
AI, “has a variety of potential uses, including user interface design and some predictive analytics; from a financial perspective, FP&A functions can integrate this.”
The future of crypto
Armstrong highlighted some of the areas of crypto that Coinbase expects to bear fruit in the coming year, including payments. “We've seen two enabling technologies come together, like stablecoins, Layer-2 solutions like Base, which I think will make payments more and more viable,” he said, pointing to a “spark” of activity in emerging markets. Like Africa.
Decentralized social media is also “exciting,” Armstrong said. “We are now starting to build a decentralized identity through ENS, a continuous graph,” he said. “Every post that someone can make, that text, or image or video, you can basically make it an NFT.”
A number of decentralized social media projects have gone public in the past year amid the struggles of the popular Twitter platform, including Bluesky, Nostr, Friend.Tech, and LensProtocol.
Stablecoins, DeFi And NFTs “There's still a long way to go,” Armstrong said, but “it can help push crypto into the next wave of adoption,” along with payments and decentralized social media. “They've got tens of billions of dollars locked up each, so they're not new. But you know, how do 100 million or a billion people use that every day?”
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
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