AI agents may make dollar stablecoins the money of machine commerce

Why payments built for people do not fit agents

Ferrari, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's GeoTech Center, argues that today's payment systems assume a person is in the loop. That means an account opened with identity checks, a human to approve or dispute a charge, settlement in hours or days, and fees a buyer will tolerate a few times a day.

Agents break these assumptions. They act on delegated authority, spending within limits a person sets and changes at will. They can transact around the clock, whether or not the user is online, and at fractions of a cent when they use data or compute. This raises design questions: how to prove which agent is acting and for whom, how to authorize it and limit its standing privileges, and who is liable when it makes a mistake.

The piece points to the Perplexity case as a sign of how unsettled this is. In August, a US appeals court lifted an injunction that had barred Perplexity's shopping agent from Amazon, ruling that when an agent acts on a user's instruction, it is the user who accesses the platform. Amazon has since blocked Muse, Meta's personal AI agent, in a similar dispute.

Competing rails and an early stablecoin edge

Industry is already writing technical rules. Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) records a user's instructions in cryptographically signed mandates that bind an agent to a specific purchase, giving merchants proof of authorization. Coinbase has built x402 into AP2 so agents can pay in stablecoins over the web, including very small payments. Visa (Trusted Agent Protocol) and Mastercard (Agent Pay) are developing approaches to agent identity, authorization and payment.

Several forms of money are competing: dollar stablecoins, tokenized bank deposits, card-network agent-payment systems and, in some countries, central bank digital currencies. The author says regulation, market validation and trust will shape the result as much as technology.

Stablecoins have what the article calls an early structural advantage. Around 97 percent of stablecoin issuance is dollar-denominated, and they offer continuous settlement and low-cost handling of small-value transactions. That makes them an early contender, though not necessarily the eventual winner.

What it could mean for the dollar and Treasuries

If dollar stablecoins become a dominant rail, they could strengthen the dollar's global position and extend its reach into the machine economy. Federal law requires permitted stablecoins to be fully backed by cash, short-term Treasuries and similar liquid assets. At the end of 2025, Tether alone reported about $122 billion in direct holdings of US Treasuries ($141 billion including repurchase agreements), more than the entire state of Germany holds, according to the article.

The stablecoin market is now more than $300 billion, and Citi projects it could reach $1.9 trillion by 2030. US federal debt is above $40 trillion, and the country has lost its top credit rating from all three major agencies, which the author says makes new structural demand for Treasuries more important.

Some analysts, including macro strategist Luke Gromen, argue that stablecoin demand could let Washington finance part of its debt more cheaply, which at scale would amount to financial repression. The author notes this only works once reserves are large enough to move Treasury yields, and they are not there yet.

Risks and the policy to-do list

Tether and Circle together hold about 85 percent of the market. A loss of confidence in a large stablecoin could trigger rapid redemptions and forced sales of Treasuries. Machine speed adds a vulnerability: agents can transact continuously, while parts of the financial system still rely on processes built around human trading hours. An agent-induced run could build while an issuer cannot sell reserve assets because markets are closed.

Ferrari says these risks are manageable and outlines two tasks for policymakers. First, finish the US rulebook for the GENIUS Act, enacted in July 2025. The OCC proposed rules in February, the FDIC in April and Treasury in August, and the law takes effect by January 18, 2027 at the latest. The final rules should add:

• closer supervision of issuers that hold most of the market;
• a cap on how much of an issuer's reserves can sit at a single bank;
• reserve reporting frequent enough to keep up with machine-speed redemptions;
• a wind-down plan that can start before a failing issuer has to sell bills into a stressed market.

Second, coordinate standards internationally. The GENIUS Act lets Treasury recognize a foreign stablecoin regime as comparable to the US one. Using that lever with close partners and aligning rules on agent identity through the BIS and the Financial Stability Board could help dollar rails work across jurisdictions.

If AI agents come to rely on dollar-denominated assets, stablecoins and US payment infrastructure, the author writes, the dollar would become embedded in the operating system of machine commerce, which makes today's rules consequential for US financial power well beyond payments.