THE FINTECH INTERVIEW
regulatory preference. Keith identifies several crucial factors that will determine which currencies and monetary instruments dominate. Will stablecoins, central bank digital currencies and tokenised bank deposits all coexist? Or will one format emerge victorious? Currency selection matters too. Will all major currencies move onto blockchain infrastructure in equal volumes? Or will certain currencies, likely the US dollar, achieve dominance in on-chain finance?
“ It’ s still too early to say, but those are the things that regulators are thinking about,” Keith continues.“ It’ s going to take a long time before we have regulatory convergence.”
AI agents and programmable money The convergence of AI and blockchain technology creates new use cases for stablecoins. Keith identifies AI agents as particularly important drivers of future stablecoin adoption.
Coinbase recently released X402, a protocol that enables AI agents to make payments using stablecoins. The technology builds on the on-chain HTTP protocol, allowing websites, businesses and AI agents to conduct commerce through cryptocurrency wallets and programmable money.
“ It’ s still very early days, but that’ s a really exciting way that you’ re seeing AI and crypto start to overlap,” Keith explains.
The logic becomes clear when considering how AI agents operate. These autonomous software systems
“ It’ s going to take a long time before we have regulatory convergence”
Keith Grose, UK CEO, Coinbase
need to conduct thousands or millions of micro-transactions.
An AI agent might pay fractions of a penny to access a website, crawl data or receive an answer to a query.
Traditional payment systems cannot economically process such small transactions. Payment card fees typically exceed the transaction value for purchases under several pounds. Stablecoins enable micropayments at scale with negligible transaction costs.
“ When you have agents, you’ re going to have to have two things,” Keith says.“ You have to be able to support micro transactions at scale, thousands of cents for viewing a website or crawling a website or providing an answer, and it has to be programmable. Those two things are perfect use cases for crypto payments.”
Major technology companies are beginning to recognise these possibilities. Stripe, the payments processor, recently acquired Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure company.
34 November 2025