(22 January 2026 – Switzerland) In a landscape where autonomous agents are performing millions of micro-transactions per second, legacy banking systems will soon become a structural impossibility according to Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire at the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Stablecoins are set to become the foundational payment layer for artificial intelligence (AI) with Allaire advising the WEF panel that “billions of AI agents” will soon require a native medium of exchange and no traditional payment system can meet that demand.
The industry is entering a phase where machine‑to‑machine commerce will become routine as Circle observes use grow in cross‑border trade settlement, trade finance and peer‑to‑peer transactions.
“AI agents will be conducting economic activity continuously, at very high velocity, and often in fractions of a cent. Taking out your Visa card or firing up a bank wire is completely absurd. There is no other alternative, in my view, than stablecoins to do that right now”.
“New blockchain networks, including Circle’s own Arc chain, are being designed specifically for agentic compute, enabling AI systems to transact autonomously with cryptographic verification” Allaire stated.
“The future will be paid for in Stablecoins. Stablecoins are the only system that can support billions of AI agents transacting at scale”.