The man who built the first stablecoin thinks AI agents are about to change how the entire crypto economy works. Reeve Collins, co-founder and first CEO of Tether, explained why AI is not just another crypto narrative. He compared AI’s role in blockchain to the browser’s arrival in 1993, saying it marks crypto’s moment of true usability for everyone. He described a future where users interact with their crypto wallets through conversation, not clicks.
AI agents would handle investing, portfolio rebalancing, and payments on a user’s behalf, routing every transaction through the fastest, cheapest, and most profitable path available. The infrastructure is already being built, with Coinbase launching Agentic Wallets on February 10 to give AI agents autonomous spending and trading capabilities. Coinbase, Stripe, and Binance are actively developing the underlying framework Collins described. Stripe co-founder John Collison predicted a torrent of AI agent commerce running on stablecoins, and Binance CEO Richard Teng called AI agents and stablecoins one of 2026’s defining trends.
Collins demonstrates this future by launching STBL, a next-generation stablecoin protocol backed by OKX Ventures, designed to return yield to users rather than centralized issuers. Stablecoin transactions reached $33 trillion in 2025, up 72% year over year and double Visa’s annual volume. The concept envisions lean, on-chain businesses that reinvest rewards into users’ pockets via token-based models, a trend industry leaders have highlighted as transformative for crypto usability.
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