The Crypto AI Agent Economy (Elon Is Bullish)

Elon Musk said, "Agentic demand is growing faster than anything I've ever seen." Now, a year ago, AI agents made about 1,500 crypto payments on Coinbase's payment standard. Today, not even the most current data today, but it's 138 million. The Agentic Finance proposition is very interesting, and this is becoming the AI trade for crypto. And like Tom Lee is saying, we're going to see money flowing back down from the AI trade into crypto because crypto could be the next recipient of the AI trade money because people are very quickly going to figure out that the agentic finance era needs crypto for a variety of reasons. I don't want to talk about that with you as well as give you a few thoughts on what could be investable within this narrative which I'm not really invested at the moment aside from layer one blockchains but that's different story. We'll talk about that. So Elon Musk out here is saying agentic demand is growing faster than anything he's ever seen before. Now, a year ago, AI agents made about 1,500 crypto payments on Coinbase's payment standard. Today, today, a year later, take a guess how big that number is. And this is, you know, not even the most current data today, but it's 138 million. 138 million. Now, no human clicked buy on any of those software, paid software with crypto around the clock. And if the people building this are right, it's the beginning of the biggest user wave crypto has ever seen. Except they're not going to be humans. They're going to be crypto agents. Let me explain what's actually happening here because this is one of the few narratives in crypto right now where the data is starting to back up the hype and it's probably worth paying attention to. Even if you're not going to invest in that, it's worth knowing what's going on. So, first AI agent. It's not a chatbot that you type a question into. Those are the LLMs like Gemini, whatever, right? The agent is software that actually goes off and does things on its own. It finds data, call tools, writes code, runs trades, buys services, all that [ __ ] It's like you but a computer version running around doing things. Maybe it's smarter than us. The moment you let software act on its own, you hit a wall pretty quickly though because it needs to pay for stuff. That's where things break. You see, an AI agent can't walk into a bank and open up a bank account. Can't pass KYC. It doesn't have a passport or credit history. The entire traditional financial system is built around humans and it doesn't know what to do with a piece of code that wants to spend money. And even if it could get a bank account, the economics also don't work. Agents don't make big purchases. But generally, agents are making tiny purchases constantly, a fraction of a cent for a data request. Card networks were never designed for that. The fees would eat the entire transaction. The fees worth 10, 20, 50, 100 times more than the transaction. Every time you sell crypto to fund your life, you get destroyed by taxes and miss the next leg up. Stop doing it. The ultra wealthy, they don't liquidate their assets. They borrow against their assets. And that is what the Ether Visa card lets you do. You swipe your card for dinner. You swipe it for rent. You swipe it for flights. And you borrow against your Ethereum or your Bitcoin while your assets stay 100% intact. Then you can even earn native staking yield in the background. You keep your upside. You skip the taxable events and you get free airport lounge access. Even better, exclusively when you use the link right down here, when you use the code lark, L A RK, you might have to type it in. You unlock a massive 10% cash back on all spending for your first 3 months. That is unheard of on a crypto card. Click the link down below, get this limited time offer, use code lark, and start spending the way you should. Crypto solves all this almost by accident. An agent can't open a bank account, but it can generate a wallet in milliseconds. Stable coins move globally 24/7 with no permission needed, and they handle microp payments natively. Smart contracts can enforce spending limits, so you can give your agent a budget it physically can't exceed and say, "Hey, max you can spend is $50 a day. Figure it out. Every transaction is recorded on a public ledger so you can audit exactly what it did or have another agent audit your spending agent and give you a report every day. flag anything that it didn't like. And a wallet doubles as identity onchain invitation. Sometimes not as called a know your agent. Yeah, that's where we're heading. Gives your software a portable verifiable track record. Pretty cool. Now, here's the hot take. For years, cryptos are searching for a use case that actually needs blockchains and stable coins have been kind of the killer app for crypto blockchains. So far, DeFi has become the next one onchain finance essentially. But this is going to be probably the next big one. And this one kind of feels a bit different. Permissionless microp payments plus machine identity is something only crypto can do right now. It only can be done using cheap blockchains like sui or salana. It feels less like a nice to have thing and more like a requirement. So what does adoption actually look like? If you had in the broader ecosystem including Salana it's over 165 million transactions more than 50 million volume which is not huge. Okay but the details are more interesting than the headline over 87% of those payments are microp payments between 1/100th of a cent to 10 cents. The most common range is 1 to 10 cents. So the subscent microp payments are actually rare, but that's again exactly the kind of payment that traditional rails weren't really built for. They weren't built to do multiple two-cent transactions a day. The median time from funding a wallet to making its first payment dropped from 73 days to 18 minutes. That tells you agents are sitting, they're not sitting around anymore. They're acting. They're moving fast. They get money, they spend it, and almost 90% of wallets get topped up again within 30 days. That's not onetime experimentation. And that's recurring usage that's actually becoming useful for people. Now, there's even some more interesting geographic texture. US wallets dominate payments for AI model inference, while Chinese wallets dominate spending on security and code analysis tools. That's pretty cool. On the agent side, agent scanner reports over half a million uh registered agents, a number that doubled in a single quarter with more than 143,000 actively running across 22 networks. B&B chain leads with more than 300,000 registered. And we are extremely early. You have to understand we are going to have millions, probably billions of these agents, onchain agents spending money by the end of the decade. We're about the hockey stick. Now, let's zoom out to where all this could go. And fair warning, projections are super aggressive. McKenzie thinks AI agents could mediate $3 to5 trillion in consumer commerce by 2030. Juniper sees agent-driven actions growing from about $8 billion to about $1.5 trillion by 2030. So, there's they're much more conservative in their estimate. Yatsu from Animoka Brands has said we could see 50 to 100 billion AI agents transacting on the internet in the coming years. His line is basically that crypto's next billion users will be agents, not humans. Humans were just the beta test for the rails. Think about that. If even a slice of that happens, crypto becomes the default settlement and identity layer for the entire machine economy and essentially for the entire internet. The dream is slowly becoming a reality. What was seemed once seemed like fiction for crypto adoption is now hitting a true breakaway moment. So what are agents actually doing today? Well, they're paying for AI inference. They're paying for web data. They're paying for coding tools. They're paying for security audit audits in DeFi. They're optimizing yield. They're rebalancing portfolios. They're managing liquidity. There are autonomous trading agents. There are sentiment tools. There are AI influencers that post engage and monetize. There are agents deploying contracts. They're auditing code. They're managing treasuries. I mean, the the use case is basically anything that can be financialized on the internet from the absolute micro up to the macro can be done with AI agents. And it's slowly being adopted. We're moving from chat bots with wallets to actual economic actors that earn, spend, and compound. How do you make money? That's always the question, isn't it? This is all fantastic. The good news is unlike stable coins, and there's a few investable assets in stable coins like Circle or Athena, but those are even newer assets. For a long time, you watch stable coin adoption run without being able to really invest in anything and get to capture the upside. But the AI economy offers you some real opportunities, I think, personally. Now the total AI sector it's around worth3 to5 billion but then like if you expand it out like add in things like MIR which is really like an AI blockchain that goes up a lot more but overall the AI agent sector specifically if we don't sort of broaden it out more is about $3 to5 billion which is way way down from the early 2025 hype peak. Now a few names keep of course coming up. You have virtuals which is the leading agent launchpad on base kind of like a Shopify for AI agents. You have fetch which is the uh artificial intelligence super alliance thing whatever ASI is the ticker is one of the more mature stacks for autonomous agents and it's actually a combination of three AI protocols combining together and bringing all their technology and resources together to build the best AI stuff possible you bit tensor and this is a broader decentralized AI infrastructure play and beyond that there's you know dozens of AI agent coins something like AIXBT maybe that comes back maybe it doesn't you're really instead of betting on the infrastructure you start going down sort of pump fund route of instead of buying the casino, you're trying to figure out which roulette table to play on, which might work out for you, but also might not. Okay. Then you have like just the layer one bet. Bet on the blockchains, baby. Buy near by Sooie, Solana, Alpenlo brought the finality down to 150 milliseconds or something crazy like that. These things are ready for AI agentic finance essentially. There's a lot of names out there. If you want to go super broad, you go with the blockchains. You want to go a little more niche, you go with some of the big AI names. You want to go super degenerate, find AI agents themselves and bet on those. But that's good luck. Here's the hot take. Most AI agent tokens are still memes wearing a trench coat. The survivors will be the platforms that actually make launching useful agents cheap and the rails that settle the payments. Again, the blockchains, the bigger AI names. Those probably win here. In fact, the biggest winners might not be agent tokens at all. Think about what agents actually pay with. Stable coins, mostly USDC. Think about where they transact. Base salon B&B chain. Think about the payment standards like X42. If agents become the dominant source of onchain activity, the chains, the stable coin issues, issuers, the the payment protocols, they can all capture more durable value than any single agent token itself. I know that you don't get the millionx upside, but you get more sustainable upside, less volatility, less losing your all money in seconds. The risks of course remain real. It's still a growing sector. It may not play out how the analysts think it play out. The tokens are going to be extremely volatile. Utility is still lagging in a lot of places. Giving software a wallet creates new security problems that nobody's really fully solved yet. An agent with a bug and a budget can burn money very very fast. But I think there's some very important reasons to pay attention to the majority of onchain transactions end up being machine to machine by 2030. The oldest critique in the book that crypto is only for speculation finally definitively dies. Not because humans change the mind but because machines they never needed convincing in the first place. That's the story is very interesting one. Agentic finance is going to be absolutely monstrous. I think so. You can see it. Every week, 100,000 people get the trade idea before the crowd does. You could be one of those people for free. Or you can find out after the move's happened, after it's already played out. The Lark Davis newsletter delivers a trade of the day, a chart of the day, a market moving alpha section directly to your inbox. All the latest news, what you need to know as an investor in these markets. Timed to get ahead of the action, not react to it. It's free, it's fast, and it's the one habit separating traders who catch moves from traders who chase them. Don't be the one asking, "Why didn't I know about this?" Join the Lark Davis newsletter today. It's free. Link below.