The man who built the first stablecoin thinks AI agents are about to change how the entire crypto economy works.
Reeve Collins, co-founder and first CEO of Tether, sat down with analyst and MN Capital founder Michael van de Poppe to explain why AI is not just another crypto narrative. Collins compared AI’s role in blockchain to what the web browser did for the internet in 1993, calling it the moment crypto finally becomes usable for everyone.
“AI is going to make that very easy because you’re going to entrust your agent to make those transactions for you,” Collins said.
Talk Into Your Wallet
Collins described a future where users interact with their crypto wallets through conversation, not clicks. AI agents would handle investing, portfolio rebalancing, and payments on a user’s behalf, routing every transaction through the fastest, cheapest, and most profitable path available.
The complexity that still keeps most people away from blockchain gets abstracted away.
The infrastructure is already being built. Coinbase launched Agentic Wallets on February 10, giving AI agents autonomous spending and trading capabilities. Stripe co-founder John Collison predicted a “torrent” of AI agent commerce running on stablecoins days ago. Binance CEO Richard Teng called AI agents and stablecoins one of the defining trends of 2026.
Also Read: “The Biggest Question for Crypto”: Sam Bankman-Fried Triggers AI Payments Debate
Why Stablecoins Become the Default Currency for AI
Collins argued that stablecoins are uniquely positioned to power AI-driven payments because they combine price stability with programmable, 24/7 settlement. Large corporations could distribute fractional payments to millions of people, enabling incentive models that were previously impossible due to accounting limitations.
The numbers back this up. Stablecoin transactions hit $33 trillion in 2025, up 72% year-over-year and double Visa’s annual volume, according to Bloomberg and Artemis Analytics.
On-Chain Companies That Pay Users, Not Platforms
Collins’ most pointed claim targeted the platform economy itself.
“There will be bespoke companies that don’t have the level of overhead like Facebook has that gets to start from scratch purely on chain that has a business model that puts all of the rewards or the profits back into the user’s pocket via a token,” he said.
Analyst van de Poppe pointed out that content creators are drastically underpaid, citing roughly €1,000 for a million YouTube views. Collins agreed, saying multiple well-funded initiatives are building decentralized platforms to change that.
“The content creators are the ones that are putting all of that value into the system. And they should reap a lot more of the rewards,” he said.
Collins is not just talking. He launched STBL, a next-generation stablecoin protocol backed by OKX Ventures, designed to return yield to users instead of centralized issuers.
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