Changpeng Zhao: AI Agents Will Need Crypto Before Banks Notice

Published by James Harris on June 19, 2026June 19, 2026

Changpeng Zhao, speaking to Galaxy Research in an interview released June 18, argued that AI agents will adopt crypto payment rails before traditional banks even recognize the problem. His core claim: autonomous software cannot open a bank account, but it can use a crypto wallet.

The argument is less novel than it sounds, but the timing matters. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire made a nearly identical prediction at Davos, telling attendees that billions of AI agents could be conducting economic transactions within three to five years, according to DL News. Andreessen Horowitz analysts have sketched the same future: agents paying each other for GPU time, API calls, and data without invoices or reconciliation delays. What Zhao adds is the financial-inclusion frame, pointing to the World Bank’s Global Findex Database 2025, which shows roughly 1.3 billion adults still outside the formal financial system. His argument is that the same infrastructure built for machine-speed payments could serve people who have internet access but no dollar-denominated bank account.

The problem is that crypto has been promising financial inclusion for over a decade, and the on-ramp friction, volatility, and regulatory patchwork have consistently blunted that case in practice.

Still, the AI-agent framing is a more concrete demand signal than most use-case arguments crypto has produced. If autonomous systems genuinely need to pay for compute, storage, and data at software speed, stablecoins on low-cost settlement networks are a plausible fit in a way that, say, decentralized social media never quite was. That use case would also be largely insensitive to retail sentiment and market cycles, which is exactly the kind of structural demand that would matter in a prolonged period of compressed speculative activity. The question is whether AI-native payment volume arrives before the regulatory environment around stablecoins and self-custodied wallets hardens in ways that restrict permissionless access, a tension that is very much unresolved in the United States and the EU simultaneously.

Zhao is making this argument while navigating the aftermath of his U.S. Department of Justice case, which limits his operational role at Binance. His platform credibility as a long-term crypto forecaster is real, but his current incentive to frame crypto as structurally indispensable to emerging technology is not nothing.