AI Agents Will Reshape the Basic Unit of Economic Activity from Human to Machine

Over the past century, the basic unit of economic activity has always been human.

The past century has seen humanity as the fundamental unit of economic activity. Productivity, consumption, transactions, and financial services all cater to human needs. Yet, the dawn of AI technology is rapidly changing this landscape, enabling machines to become "active economic entities" - AI Agents - from their passive roles as tools.

In addition, at the beginning of 2025 , Tether announced that it would integrate USDT into the BTC ecosystem, covering its base layer and lightning network.

Behind all these trends, a revolution is silently brewing: AI Agent-driven payment infrastructure is pushing the crypto industry into a new wave of innovation with a breakthrough momentum. From BTC's consensus layer to the execution layer of smart contracts, and then to today's AI-driven application layer, the crypto industry is likely to usher in a paradigm innovation of AI + Pay Fi + BTC Infra, and force Web2 to self-reform to Web3 - the future of large-scale adoption is becoming a reality step by step.

1. Stablecoins: The cornerstone of a new era of global payments - a decade of evolution from cross-border revolution to mainstream currency

The programmability , cross-border practicality and increasingly clear regulatory framework of stablecoins are expected to become the standard settlement currency for global payments. With the election of Trump, who is friendly to cryptocurrencies, as the US president, the US government will gradually provide regulatory clarity on cryptocurrencies , and the application scenarios of stablecoins will gradually expand . We can even estimate a beautiful vision of stablecoin payments in the next 10 years:

Short term (1–3 years): Stablecoins will dominate cross-border remittances, providing a faster and cheaper alternative to SWIFT. Cryptocurrency-linked debit/credit cards (such as Visa/MasterCard) will simplify spending and build a bridge between on-chain wealth and real-world transactions.

Medium term (3–7 years): Businesses will increasingly adopt stablecoin payments due to their low fees, instant settlement, and programmability. Companies will be able to seamlessly convert between cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies, providing customers with dual-track payment options.

Long term (7 years and above): Stablecoins will become mainstream legal tender, widely accepted for payments and even taxation, completely subverting traditional financial infrastructure.

In addition to the convenience of payment, stablecoins still play a very positive role in other areas: for example, they provide entrepreneurs with an easier-to-access platform to develop new payment products: no middlemen, minimum balances or proprietary SDKs. In addition, it is roughly estimated that if medium and large enterprises can use service providers with stablecoin solutions in transactions, their corporate profits can increase by 2%. Moreover, countries under US sanctions, such as Russia, have tried to use stablecoins for trade between countries to bypass the US dollar settlement system.

2. Next Level: AI Agents will be the new user experience layer of future apps

Today, we no longer rely solely on AI to perform single tasks, such as image recognition, speech synthesis, or autonomous driving. Instead, we are entering an era where "AI Agents become independent market participants." This change is not limited to AI-driven financial transactions and intelligent supply chain management, but also involves generative AI (AIGC) providing services to content creators, developers, and businesses. Going further, AI agents can even "autonomously negotiate, trade, settle, and optimize their own resource utilization."

At the end of last year, we saw AI Agents redefine the application scenarios of DApps . The pioneer of this trend was @truth_terminal, an AI Agent that can promote its own token $Goat; followed by AI Agents such as Luna and AIxbt, which can use tokens to trade, generate content, and even manage their own crypto wallets and assets. The evolution of this ability has spawned innovations in narratives in the crypto field, such as Virtual Protocol, a protocol similar to Pump.fun, but its "Pump" object is not a simple token, but a variety of AI Agents.

The evolving capabilities of AI Agents, coupled with an out-of-the-box distribution platform, have opened up a market opportunity of billions of dollars for the concept of AI Agent + Crypto. AI is becoming an active participant in the on-chain ecosystem, driving blockchain applications from tooling to ecosystemization.

In the future, AI will become the user experience layer of blockchain technology, connecting the application layer and the blockchain infrastructure, and play a role both upward and downward in the technology stack. To give an example that is most understandable to crypto users, AI proactively recommends and executes on-chain DeFi operations based on the user's intentions and preferences (such as security, yield, etc.), combined with real-time information from the forecast market. Users do not need to understand the difference between L1 and L2, or even know how the cross-chain bridge works. Broadening to daily life, imagine a scenario where an AI personal financial assistant can autonomously manage