The co-founder of the venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) says crypto has finally found an edge that will drive massive consumer adoption.
In a new Latent Space interview, Marc Andreessen says AI agents are now using money and credit cards to pay for goods and services online.
Andreessen notes that the traditional payment rails are not designed to handle the incoming scale of AI agent transactions, making stablecoins and the blockchain the only existing technologies suitable for the agentic economy.
“We actually have internet-native money now in the form of stablecoins and crypto. And this is, I think, the grand unification basically of AI and crypto is what’s about to happen now. I think AI is the crypto killer app. I think that is where this is really going to come out…
Obviously, AI agents are going to need money, and it’s already happening. If you’ve got OpenClaw and you want it to buy things for you, you have to give it money in some form.”
He adds that while adoption is still limited, the pattern follows how new technologies typically emerge.
“The ultimate principle of everything and everything that I think we do is it’s the William Gibson quote, which is ‘The future is already here. It just isn’t distributed yet.’
My friends who are the most aggressive users of OpenClaw have just given their Claws bank accounts and credit cards. And not only have they done it, but it’s also obvious that they needed to do it because it’s obvious that they needed to be able to spend money on their behalf. It’s just completely obvious.
So the number of people who have done that today is probably 5,000 or something. That’s how these things start.”
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire echoes Andreessen’s view that crypto and AI are a match made in heaven. On top of agentic payments, Allaire recently said that AI agents will form entities, store value and arrange and execute contracts on-chain using smart contracts.
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