A new report from Shoal Research argues that dominance is more fragile than the number suggests: Coinbase controls the clearing layer, Stripe is building its own alternatives, and Tether has a stablecoin in the mix too.
USDC, a stablecoin issued by Circle, is currently settling 99% of agent-to-agent payments made over x402, the protocol many AI agents use to transact.
"Everyone is entering the stablecoin race," said Evin McMullen, co-founder and CEO of Billions, an identity verification network for humans and AI agents, on the DeAI News Journal. Her read: the winner won't be decided by liquidity alone.
"The only way to lead to a coherent outcome," she said, "is if we have a clear, interoperable identity solution to determine who's an agent, who's a human, and who they're accountable to."
Different stablecoin issuers have different compliance policies, including diverging approaches to freezing tokens tied to illicit activity, and that matters more once agents, not just people, are the ones spending.
Co-host Brad Keoun traced the arc: stablecoins started as a crypto-native workaround for volatility, mostly used inside crypto trading. Now traditional payments players like Stripe and Visa are building for agentic commerce directly, which changes the stakes considerably. "Stablecoins... are uniquely well suited to the capabilities and requirements of agentic interaction," Keoun said, while noting the infrastructure connecting all of it is still fragmented and early.
The numbers involved are growing fast. McMullen cited Juniper Research estimates putting the agentic economy anchored in stablecoins above $8 billion in the next year, potentially exceeding $1 trillion within a few years, with other estimates running past $3 trillion by 2030-31. Regulation hasn't kept pace: the U.S. still hasn't passed the Clarity Act, leaving open questions about how agent-driven stablecoin transactions get taxed or supervised, even as the volume of money moving through these rails keeps climbing.
HOW AI WAS USED IN THE PRODUCTION OF THIS PIECE: This story was filed to DistroVerse using the Distro Publisher MCP connector. I then used our built-in story editor to edit the piece. I used ChatGPT to create a story illustration using a custom skill designed for editorial workflows.