France Risks Missing the AI Agent and Stablecoin Payment Wave: Experts Say Tax System Must Be Adjusted Within 6 Months to Avoid Marginalization

Odaily reports that an opinion piece published in the French media *Le Monde* argues that France may have only about six months to seize the new industrial wave led by "agentic AI," or it risks being marginalized in the global digital financial system. Several French crypto industry insiders noted that online transactions driven by AI agents are growing rapidly, with a majority of these settlements already conducted using stablecoins. According to the *State of Crypto* report by Andreessen Horowitz, the annual transaction volume of stablecoins has reached approximately $46 trillion, nearly three times that of Visa and 20 times that of PayPal, positioning them as a key infrastructure in the global payment system.

The article further points out that the x402 standard, championed by Coinbase and adopted by companies like Cloudflare, Google, and Visa, already supports AI agents automatically completing payments via stablecoins, with cumulative transactions exceeding 119 million to date.

However, regarding taxation, France's current regulations are criticized as being unable to adapt to this trend. The complex tax treatment between stablecoin exchanges and fiat currency withdrawals is seen as discouraging capital from flowing back into the banking system, leaving a large volume of digital asset transactions permanently locked within the stablecoin ecosystem. As AI agents and stablecoin payments gradually converge, the global financial infrastructure is being restructured. If France fails to promptly adjust its regulatory and tax framework, it may miss out on the dividends of the new digital economy.