Coinbase CEO: Stablecoins Will Be AI Agents’ Preferred Payment Rail

The pitch here is that autonomous software, not consumers, becomes the marginal stablecoin user, which reframes the asset from a trading and remittance tool into machine-to-machine settlement infrastructure. That matters most to the issuers and chains that capture agent traffic, and to the compliance and identity layers that would have to underwrite non-human counterparties. The open question is whether agent payment demand materializes as real on-chain volume or stays a narrative; stablecoin supply growth alone would not settle it.