Animoca's Yat Siu Says 50 to 100 Billion AI Agents Will Need Crypto Wallets Because Banks Won't Serve Them

Yat Siu runs 280 AI agents. One scans X for trending code repositories and checks whether they are real. Another exploits grocery price differences between supermarkets, where eggs can carry 150% arbitrage depending on promotions. None of them can open a bank account.

That gap is the foundation of Siu’s thesis. “Is JP Morgan gonna open an account for an agent? Probably not gonna happen,” the Animoca Brands co-founder and executive chairman told the On The Margin podcast. “So how do they do that? They have a wallet.”

The Banking Problem

The argument is straightforward: agents that spend money need accounts, and banks won’t serve software. A crypto wallet gives a piece of software the one thing a traditional financial institution will not: an account it can hold and spend from without a human filling in a form.

Chandler Fang, founder of t54 Labs and a former Ripple and JPMorgan executive, made the same point on the podcast. “Our entire financial ecosystem was primarily human-centric,” Fang said. He characterized stablecoins as “a very AI native way” for one machine to pay another.

Nitya Subramanian, founder of wallet firm Para, framed wallets as a control mechanism rather than just a spending tool. “I could create a stablecoin-backed card and give it $200 a week and just have it buy Chipotle,” Subramanian said. The wallet becomes a budget constraint, not just a payment channel.

Siu’s own agents are already transacting. “We already have agents that are trading on Hyperliquid. We also have agents that can trade on Polymarket,” he said. “That’s all happening right now.”

The Scale Forecast

Siu’s numbers are projections, not measurements. Count a few agents per person across the online world, he said, and “you’re gonna have anywhere from 50 to 100 billion agents minimum.” His mental model for them: “a little bit like your own Sims. Every agent has a personality and they kind of do stuff. It’s like a game, except they have real world outcomes.”

Where that volume bites first, he argued, is the advertising-funded web. Website traffic for many publishers is down 80% as AI search interfaces replace click-through behavior. “The total online advertising revenues is around $900 billion a year,” Siu said. “That’s all gonna shift into a kind of transactional invocation economy powered by agents.” Global all-media ad spending crossed $1 trillion in 2025, according to Forbes, so the order of magnitude holds even if the digital-only figure is generous.

Varun Kabra, chief growth officer at Concordium, put a timeline on it: “We’re probably six to twelve months away where these transactions might overtake the human to human transactions.” His caveat: the counterparty currently “has no way to verify where a real accountable human is behind the transaction.”

The Incumbents Are Moving

Financial incumbents are not waiting for the infrastructure question to resolve itself. Coinbase’s x402 standard counted roughly 69,000 active AI agents and more than 165 million transactions as of April 2026, with Stripe, Visa, Circle, and Cloudflare among its backers. Visa rolled out a Trusted Agent Protocol in late 2025. Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines in June 2026 with more than 30 partners including Coinbase and Adyen. Skyfire, founded by former Ripple executives, raised $9.5 million from Coinbase Ventures and a16z specifically to hand agents USDC wallets.

The convergence of payment rails from both crypto-native infrastructure (x402, stablecoins) and traditional finance (Visa, Mastercard) suggests the market is treating agent payments as an infrastructure requirement, not a speculative bet.

The Skeptic’s Case

Not everyone is convinced. Ron Shultz, who runs bill pay at ACI Worldwide, pushed back on the podcast. “I challenge you or anyone else, go find me 10 people who want to use a stablecoin to make a bill payment and explain to me why,” Shultz said.

The demand for agent-driven payments is real (Coinbase’s x402 numbers and Robinhood’s 50,000+ agentic trading accounts confirm that), but Siu’s 50-to-100 billion figure remains speculative. The question is less whether agents will need payment infrastructure and more whether crypto wallets are the only viable answer, or whether traditional banks eventually adapt their onboarding to accommodate software entities.

Siu’s response to the skeptics: “If you refuse to access it, if you say I don’t want anything to do with it, that’s no different than saying I don’t want to be on the internet.”