Today’s payments stack was designed to be human-first.
But on the latest episode of “From the Block,” J. Christopher Giancarlo, former Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chair and co-founder of the Digital Dollar Project, said the next phase of commerce may increasingly be driven by artificial intelligence software agents transacting autonomously in real time.
Joining PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster and Citi’s Global Head of Digital Assets for Treasury and Trade Solutions Ryan Rugg, Giancarlo outlined a future where payments fade almost entirely into the digital experience itself.
“The future of payments are going to be subsumed in the experience,” he said. “The best part of Uber is the end of the ride where you just get out of the vehicle, and you don’t have to fish for a credit card.”
AI systems will increasingly negotiate services, coordinate logistics, manage subscriptions and optimize financial decisions continuously in the background, Giancarlo said. Cars may autonomously order coffee through embedded wallets, and consumers may pay fractions of a cent to access individual pieces of digital content rather than maintaining full subscriptions.
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Webster challenged the idea that stablecoins are inherently necessary for that future.
“A cynic might say, ‘Well, if it’s machines, a machine doesn’t know a stablecoin from a Visa-issued debit card,’” she said. “Why does it?”
The distinction matters because today’s payment rails were built around human behavior, including relatively large transaction sizes, visible checkout moments, delayed settlement and periodic billing cycles, Giancarlo said. AI-native commerce changes those assumptions.
“The opportunity here is that the dollar becomes the reference currency for a digital agentic payment future,” he said.
Is AI the Missing Piece That Makes Stablecoins Matter?
Stablecoins are frequently described as better payments rails, but that framing can feel incomplete. Consumers already tap phones to pay for coffee, and enterprises already move billions of dollars electronically every day. But those are human tasks.
As agentic AI systems begin making decisions, coordinating logistics, negotiating services and executing purchases autonomously, programmable money becomes less of a cryptocurrency feature and more of a foundational requirement for machine commerce.
“We’re going to be able to move away from paying $50 for a one-year subscription to read the two articles that I read each year,” Giancarlo said. “My reader in my laptop is going to recognize my eyeballs read 450 characters and is going to charge me a number out five decimal points for that.”
Such models become economically viable only when transaction costs collapse close to zero, he said.
That growing mismatch between legacy capability and contemporary expectations could ultimately require infrastructure capable of supporting continuous programmable micropayments at machine speed.
While Giancarlo said he believes legacy card rails were never designed to handle such payments efficiently, Webster said many forms of embedded commerce already exist today through stored payment credentials and app-based transactions.
Giancarlo agreed but argued that the shift underway is less about the consumer experience itself than the invisible infrastructure powering it.
Why Banks Are Embracing Interoperability Over Disruption
For years, digital assets were framed as a rebellion against traditional finance. Banks were supposed to disappear, intermediaries were supposedly doomed and decentralization itself was often treated as the product. Today, the market is now entering a phase of institutional synthesis. Traditional financial systems are absorbing the technological innovations that crypto pioneered while retaining the trust, compliance and scale advantages of regulated finance.
Citi’s Rugg described a future where wallets become interoperable containers capable of handling stablecoins, tokenized deposits, traditional payment rails and digital assets interchangeably. The goal is to abstract away the underlying complexity entirely.
“We’re successful if we’re not talking about blockchains and digital assets and tokens,” Rugg said. “You just have that instantaneous movement of value.”
Large institutions do not want fragmented crypto-native experiences involving separate wallets, private key management or isolated blockchain ecosystems, she said. They want embedded infrastructure that integrates seamlessly into existing enterprise systems.
That evolution mirrors earlier infrastructure transitions on the internet itself. Consumers or institutional end users rarely think about TCP/IP, cloud hosting or packet routing. Financial infrastructure may be heading toward a similar level of invisibility.
“I think we go to a world built on digital network transfers of value rather than the message-based system we have today,” Giancarlo said. “The future of digital networks is going to be a multi-network world.”
In his own upcoming book, “The New Adventures of Crypto Dad,” Giancarlo compares crypto’s trajectory to the American Revolution, a decentralized uprising that ultimately produced a new synthesis between centralized authority and distributed power. In that framework, blockchain becomes less a rebellion against finance and more a modernization layer for it.
Crypto’s speculative phase may not be entirely over. But the sector’s blockchain infrastructure phase has begun.
The Geopolitical Battle Over Digital Dollars
Stablecoins are also increasingly becoming entangled with global monetary strategy, where the geopolitical stakes remain enormous.
Webster suggested that stablecoins may be forcing governments and central banks to rethink the very definition of digital money itself.
Europe worries about dependence on American payment giants like Visa and Mastercard, Brazil fears capital flight into dollar-denominated digital assets, and nations like China seek monetary independence while strengthening state control. Meanwhile, the United States appears increasingly committed to allowing the private sector, not the Federal Reserve, to lead digital dollar innovation.
Despite co-founding the Digital Dollar Project, Giancarlo said the organization has “never endorsed the United States adopting a CBDC.” Instead, the priority should be ensuring that the dollar remains globally dominant in a world increasingly built on digital networks.
“The dollar must be future-proof for a world of digital networks,” he said. “And the only way to make the digital dollar the world’s aspirational currency is not just because of the strength of the U.S. economy, but because it reflects the values of free society.”
Digital money is not politically neutral infrastructure. The architecture itself encodes values around transparency, autonomy and control. The unanswered question is whether democratic societies can modernize money without surrendering the balance between security, commerce and individual freedom that analog systems once provided.
“We haven’t gotten privacy right yet,” Giancarlo said. “If we get the values right, a digital dollar is going to win. If we get the values wrong, we’ve lost the future.”
But Giancarlo warned that privately issued stablecoins may ultimately create even more expansive forms of financial monitoring because commercial players face fewer constitutional constraints than governments do.
Healthy systems depend on calibrated opacity, he said. A homebuyer does not disclose their maximum price to a seller; a seller does not reveal their minimum acceptable offer. Maintaining that productive tension may ultimately become the defining battle of the next financial era, whether it’s one driven by AI or by humans.
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