Crypto Agent商业化基础设施研究：以稳定币为核心“原生货币层”与结算网络深度解析

For an AI Agent to truly become an economic entity, the first step is not to become smarter, but to have its own wallet.

Generative AI is evolving from a "chatbot" into an agent (AI Agent) capable of taking action on its own. A practical question arises: how do these silicon-based "employees" get paid and make payments? The traditional banking system—with its real-name authentication, manual authorization, and corporate accounts—is inherently incompatible with AI Agents.

One rapidly emerging answer is to build a native "money layer" for AI using stablecoins (USDC, USDT, and yield-bearing stablecoins). This article will analyze the implementation strategies of leading companies like Coinbase, Circle, and Stripe in this field, while also discussing the associated compliance and security risks.

The technical infrastructure is ready, but how to drive adoption remains a significant challenge.

1. The "Payment Gap" Facing AI Agent Commercialization

Current AI Agents are quite capable: booking flights, writing code, calling APIs... but they hit a wall at the "payment" step. Traditional payment systems are designed for humans—requiring ID cards, verification codes, operating within business hours, and incurring non-trivial transaction fees. All of these are obstacles for an Agent.

Specifically, the traditional payment system presents four major barriers for Agents:

• Identity Barrier: Opening a bank account or credit card requires an ID, facial recognition, and even bank statements—things an Agent cannot provide.
• Authorization Barrier: Payments often require SMS verification codes, manual confirmation clicks, or 3D Secure authentication. Agents can't receive SMS or click buttons.
• Time Barrier: Banks process transfers only on business days during operating hours, while Agents need to operate 24/7.
• Cost Barrier: Each transaction has a fixed fee (e.g., credit card fees start at $0.30), making a per-use model costing $0.001 economically unfeasible. However, Agent economic activities often require these small, high-frequency payments (e.g., billing by API call or usage).

The more fundamental issue is that the entire payment system was never designed for "program-to-program" direct transfers. Even between two tech companies, the process often is: Agent generates order → sends email to human → human approves → human logs into online banking to transfer → counterparty's finance reconciles. The Agent only handles the first two steps and the final record; the core step of "money moving from A to B" requires human intervention.

Current Attempts: All Mimicking Humans, Instead of Creating New Accounts for Agents

The industry has made several attempts, but they essentially force Agents to "pretend to be human":

• Virtual Credit Cards + API: Agents use APIs like Stripe to pay, but the underlying card and identity are still human. When risk control detects anomalies (too fast transactions, unusual amounts), it triggers manual verification.
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Making Agents click through online banking pages like a human. If the bank website changes, the CAPTCHA changes from numbers to sliders, or an extra verification step is added, the script breaks.
• Delegated Payment: A human pre-approves a budget for the Agent to spend. However, approving budgets, renewing them, and checking accounts still require human effort.

The common flaw in these solutions: Agents lack their own accounts, merely "borrowing an identity." Their autonomy can be revoked by the bank or platform at any time.

Why Stablecoins Are a Better Solution: Giving Agents a Native "Money Pouch"

For an Agent to truly manage its own money, it needs a monetary system that is programmable, doesn't require human identity, operates 24/7, has transparent and auditable ledgers, and maintains relatively stable value. Stablecoins precisely provide these features:

• Programmable: Logic can be coded directly; payment triggers automatically upon condition fulfillment without manual button clicks.
• Permissionless: Agents can generate their own wallet address without queuing at a bank to open an account.
• Always-On: No weekends, holidays, or after-hours restrictions.
• Transparent Ledger: Every transaction is on the blockchain, visible to all, facilitating auditing.
• Stable Value: Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, they don't experience wild price swings, making them suitable for pricing and long-term settlement.

Stablecoins are not without risk. Fiat-collateralized ones like USDC and USDT rely on centralized custody and audits and have historically experienced brief de-pegging. Pure algorithmic stablecoins have been proven infeasible. This article focuses on regulated, mainstream fiat-collateralized stablecoins.

2. Who is Building for the Payment Agent?

The direction is clear, but who is laying the groundwork? Over the past year and a half, leading companies like Coinbase, Circle, and Stripe have moved beyond conceptual discussions to launching usable tools and protocols. Each approaches it from a different angle: some specialize in Agent wallets and payment rails, others solve cross-chain settlement, and some bridge fiat and stablecoins.

Coinbase: Base Chain + AgentKit Toolkit

Coinbase launched AgentKit, a development toolkit enabling developers to equip AI Agents with on-chain wallets and payment capabilities. In February 2026, they released Agentic Wallets, integrating five core functions: identity, depositing funds, paying, transacting, and earning yield. Underlying it is the x402 protocol, co-developed with Cloudflare, specifically designed for "machine-to-machine" payments.

By early 2026, this protocol had processed over 50 million transactions. On the security front, Agentic Wallets allows setting limits like "maximum spend per session" or "maximum spend per transaction."

Circle: CCTP Cross-Chain Protocol + AgentStack

Circle's CCTP (Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol) solves the secure transfer of USDC between different blockchains. Using a "burn-mint" mechanism, it avoids reliance on third-party bridges, making it inherently more secure and compliant. Building on this, Circle launched AgentStack in 2025, comprising: Agent wallets (supporting gasless transactions), CCTP, Gateway Nanopayments (supporting amounts as low as $0.000001), and an Agent service marketplace.

CCTP added "Hooks" functionality, allowing AI Agents to attach business data during cross-chain transfers, enabling operations like "automatic crediting or reinvestment upon cross-chain arrival" in one step.

In March 2026, Circle launched the Circle Skills open-source library, allowing AI Agents (like Claude) to autonomously decide when to use CCTP versus Gateway Nanopayments.

Stripe: Stablecoin API, Bridging Traditional Commerce and the On-Chain World

Stripe officially launched its Stablecoin API in 2025 and, through the acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge, built a compliant bridge from traditional commerce to the on-chain ecosystem. In October of the same year, they launched stablecoin subscription payments, initially supporting USDC subscriptions on Base and Polygon chains. They also wrote smart contracts to solve the hassle of "manually signing each payment," allowing users to save wallets as payment methods and authorize recurring automatic debits.

Stripe uses its own backend ledger and KYC/AML compliance monitoring, abstracting away complex blockchain elements like private key management and gas fees. When an AI Agent needs to transact with a traditional merchant, Stripe provides a legally compliant channel for USD exchange and settlement.

Beyond these three major players, some traditional leading internet companies are also starting to establish a presence in this area:

• AWS + Stripe + Coinbase (May 2026): A tri-party collaboration to launch a USDC-based payment infrastructure, allowing AI Agents to pay for digital services like cloud computing and API calls themselves. Amazon Bedrock's AgentCore Payments acts as the payment layer, settling on Base in approximately 200 milliseconds at a cost of less than $0.01 per transaction. Stripe implemented its own MPP (Machine Payment Protocol), supporting "streaming payments" that deduct fees in real-time based on compute consumption or token usage per second. On the same day, Stripe and Tempo released the MPP open standard, with Visa also announcing support.
• Google + Coinbase (September 2025): Jointly launched the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), integrating Google's Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication framework with Coinbase's x402 payment rails, enabling Agents to complete the entire workflow of "negotiating price → paying → issuing receipts." Initial partners include ServiceNow, Salesforce, PwC, Shopee, and Worldpay.
• Virtuals Protocol + Ethereum Foundation (March 2026): Jointly proposed ERC-8183 (Agentic Commerce), an on-chain commerce settlement standard specifically for AI Agents. The core concept is the "Job": A buyer, seller, and arbiter lock funds via a smart contract, settling through a state machine of "Create → Fund → Deliver → Complete/Reject/Expire."

3. Typical Application Scenarios for the Silicon-Based Economy

With the infrastructure in place, if AI Agents have their own stablecoin wallets, capable of receiving payments, making payments, cross-chain transfers, and earning yield, they will cease to be isolated tools and can form a self-operating micro-economy. Here, we analyze application scenarios where partial implementation has already occurred in the short term and which hold the most potential for realizing the value of a silicon-based economy.

Scenario 1: DeFi Yield Optimization – Letting Agents "Make Money Grow"

In traditional finance, idle cash in checking accounts earns little to no interest. In the DeFi world, stablecoin holders can deposit funds into lending protocols (like Aave, Morpho, Compound) to earn interest. The problem is that interest rates across different protocols and chains fluctuate constantly, making it difficult for humans to monitor and rebalance frequently. This is precisely where AI Agents excel.

Take the Walbi platform, which processed over 187,000 transactions initiated autonomously by AI Agents within 14 weeks, involving 9,500 unique Agents—all without human intervention. Agents automatically scan lending rates across chains, calculate net yield after deducting gas fees, and shift funds from low-yield to high-yield pools. Consider ZENITH's approach: deploying independent AI Agents on major public chains like Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base, each managing DeFi protocols (Aave, Morpho, Compound) on its own chain. When an Agent identifies a rate differential on another chain sufficient to cover cross-chain costs, it transfers funds via protocols like CCTP.

Why are Agents necessary for this task? Manual human operation faces three difficulties: first, simultaneously tracking rate changes across multiple protocols generates massive data; second, cross-chain operations are cumbersome, requiring manual signing for each transaction; third, the transaction fees and time costs of high-frequency rebalancing are prohibitive. AI Agents paired with stablecoins can achieve 24/7 monitoring, millisecond-level response, automated execution, and fully traceable and auditable transactions.

Scenario 2: Micropayments – Unlocking the "Pay-Per-Use" Long-Tail Economy

Traditional payment systems have fixed transaction fees (credit card fees start at $0.30), making micropayments (e.g., $0.001) economically unviable. However, for AI services (billing by API calls, images generated, or queries made), micropayments represent the most natural pricing model. The low fees and support for micro-denominations inherent in stablecoins make micropayments feasible again.

The x402 protocol, co-developed by Coinbase and Cloudflare, embeds payment directly into HTTP requests. When a client accesses a protected API, the server returns a 402 status code (Payment Required) along with a payment request (e.g., "Please pay 0.001 USDC"). The client's built-in Agent wallet automatically makes the payment to access the data or service. By early 2026, this protocol had processed over 50 million transactions. Typical use cases include API paywalls, pay-per-access high-value datasets, and real-time market data subscriptions.

Circle's Gateway Nanopayments goes further, designed for high-frequency, ultra-small value transactions, supporting USDC transfers as low as $0.000001, with no gas fees for the recipient. The underlying principle is "batch settlement + state channels," where multiple micropayments are aggregated off-chain, settling the net amount on-chain only once. This allows Agents to pay in real-time for each API call, megabyte of storage, or second of compute, with near-zero fees. Without micropayments, AI Agent commercialization would be confined to subscription plans or pre-paid credit models. With them, Agents can achieve precise, utility-like billing, and inter-Agent collaboration (e.g., Agent A paying fractional cents each time it calls Agent B's model inference service) can occur with minimal friction.

Scenario 3: From "Idle Funds" to "Auto-Yield" – The Advanced Practice of Yield-Bearing Stablecoins

In traditional finance, money sitting in corporate checking accounts generates little to no interest. Active treasury management requires researching products, signing agreements, and manually transferring funds in and out, a cumbersome and time-sensitive process often neglected by small and medium enterprises. Stablecoins combined with AI Agents completely overturn this logic.

When an Agent holds yield-bearing stablecoins (like aUSDC, sDAI, eUSD), the wallet balance automatically accumulates yield—these stablecoins are essentially deposit certificates for DeFi protocols, with interest reflected in the rising exchange rate of the token. An Agent can "do nothing and still earn yield." Crucially, a well-designed yield management Agent can also automatically switch between different yield-bearing assets, achieving the goal of "earning yield while remaining ready to pay."

The yield orchestration platform launched by Ymax in February 2026 is a prime example: with a single signature authorization from the user, the Agent automatically allocates funds across multiple vaults like Morpho, Aave, and Compound, automatically rebalancing based on real-time rates, with yield accumulating by the second, requiring no further user intervention. Another firm, aarnaFinance, offers AI-managed vaults integrating over twenty on-chain yield sources (lending, staking, vault strategies), with Agents dynamically constructing investment portfolios achieving stablecoin-denominated annualized yields of 8-12%. By comparison, traditional bank checking account rates are typically below 0.5%, and USD money market funds yield around 4-5% annually.

For an AI Agent, the ability to earn yield is not merely an added bonus; it could fundamentally alter the underlying economic logic. An auto-yielding Agent could use its earned interest to cover its operational costs (gas fees, API calls) or even accumulate more capital for executing complex tasks. Agents cease to be "cash-burning" liabilities and transform into "self-sustaining" micro-economies. When billions of such Agents operate simultaneously, they will foster an entirely new, program-driven financial sub-market.

4. Necessary Challenges for Large-Scale Adoption

The infrastructure is ready, and the scenarios are proven, but don't celebrate just yet. Unless the following hurdles are overcome, large-scale commercial use remains a distant prospect.

Private Key Management and Security

A major flaw in many current AI Agent wallet designs is directly handing over the private key or API credentials to the Agent. If compromised by a "prompt injection attack" (e.g., a malicious actor induces the Agent to perform harmful actions via input), the private key can be leaked. Audit firm Sherlock identified "malicious third-party skills," "indirect prompt injection," "credential exposure," and "improper wallet permission design" as the top Web3 Agent security risks for 2026. On-chain transactions are irreversible; one wrong signature can lead to permanent loss.

A real-world lesson: In the Owockibot incident of February 2026, an autonomous AI Agent leaked its hot wallet private key in multiple places, forcing the project team to cut off its internet and cryptographic operation capabilities. The project founder admitted: "I severely underestimated the security difficulty of this project. It must be re-architected from a security-first perspective."

Currently explored solutions include:

• Isolated Signing Layer: The Agent can propose "I want to pay X amount to Y," but the actual signing occurs in a separate hardware security module or custody layer.
• MetaMask Smart Account Approach: Agents can initiate transactions but never gain access to the private key. Using ERC-4337 smart accounts and ERC-7710 delegated authorization, permissions can be finely controlled.

Compliance and Regulatory Gaps

Traditional KYC must evolve into "Know Your Agent" (KYA), but this category doesn't exist legally. An Agent is not a legal entity; it cannot own assets, sign contracts, or assume liability for breach of contract. If an Agent makes an erroneous payment,