Written by: Phemex CEO Federico Variola
Original Title: 《What AI Agents Need from Crypto Exchanges》
Translated and Compiled by: BitpushNews
On February 11, Coinbase launched Agentic Wallets, the first wallet infrastructure built specifically for AI agents. During the same week, Stripe introduced machine payment features using USDC stablecoin. Visa, PayPal, and Mastercard also announced or expanded their agent commerce programs. In just a few days, the world's largest payment companies recognized that software needs its own currency.
This is not an isolated event. The supply of stablecoins has surpassed $300 billion, with settlements completed in seconds. Smart contracts can hold, move, and allocate capital without human intervention.
For anyone operating a exchange, this changes the nature of the conversation. The question is no longer whether AI agents will participate in financial markets, but whether exchanges are building infrastructure for this participation or merely standing by as outsiders.
Platform Transformation Has Occurred
Centralized platforms initially served only as order books for Bitcoin. They later added perpetual contracts, followed by lending, staking, on-chain token access, and now traditional financial assets.
On mainstream exchanges, users can settle with the same stablecoin in one margin account, trading stocks, futures, precious metals, and cryptocurrency derivatives around the clock. This is no longer just an exchange in the traditional sense; it is a complete financial interface. The competitive benchmark is no longer Binance or OKX, but any platform that allows for efficient capital movement.
The growth in the decentralized space is similarly rapid. Hyperliquid processes billions of euros in daily perpetual contract volume on its own Layer 1, executing at speeds comparable to centralized venues. Lighter has launched 10x leveraged on-chain perpetual contracts for Samsung and Hyundai stocks. Jupiter has directly integrated Polymarket into its DEX, allowing Solana users to access prediction markets without cross-chain transactions or leaving the app. By 2025, the perpetual contract trading volume ratio between DEX and CEX has tripled, rising from about 6% to nearly 19%.
Both sides are converging on the same outcome: access to any market and any asset anytime, anywhere. The debate between centralized and decentralized no longer serves as a valid organizational principle. What distinguishes the next generation of platforms is no longer the markets they offer, but how intelligently they operate.
AI Agents Encounter Bottlenecks
We have a global, programmable financial infrastructure; a stablecoin circuit that handles trillions of dollars annually; and smart contracts that can execute complex strategies without human intervention. Yet, the most powerful AI agents today still cannot independently execute trades, pay for computational costs, or rebalance portfolios unless someone clicks "confirm."
Coinbase has taken a significant step with Agentic Wallets. Its x402 protocol has handled over 50 million machine-to-machine (M2M) transactions, allowing agents to self-custody funds, trade tokens, and conduct on-chain transfers. However, beyond Coinbase, relevant infrastructure is almost nonexistent. Most exchanges lack a framework for agent-driven execution, identity layers for non-human participants, and spending control systems designed for software that makes thousands of micro-decisions per hour and runs continuously.
The CEO of Circle predicts that in three to five years, there will be billions of AI agents trading with stablecoins. Google has launched a universal business protocol for agent trading. Projects like Kite are building entire blockchains around cryptographic identity and governance for autonomous systems.
Traditional finance has not waited for the crypto industry to solve these problems. Banks and payment processors are already building agent infrastructure on their own terms. Once institutional capital flows into these proprietary systems, there will be no turning back.
Why Cryptocurrencies Should Be the Default Choice
Every characteristic that makes cryptocurrencies inconvenient for ordinary retail users is precisely what makes them the ideal choice for software. AI agents do not need customer support or fancy interfaces; they need permissionless settlement, programmable funds, and a circuit that never shuts down. The crypto industry has built these.
The issue is not capability, but focus.
Most exchanges still see their platforms as services to "human traders" who log in, place orders, and log out. The next cycle will be shaped by those platforms that serve both human traders and autonomous agents in the same environment, with services that span both crypto and traditional assets.
I have seen this model before. When stablecoins first gained attention, exchanges viewed them as niche tools for over-the-counter trading. The crypto industry built dominant stablecoins (USDT and USDC still hold the vast majority of the market share), but the industry was slow to regard them as foundational infrastructure. This delay has given banks the opportunity, and now banks are launching their own stablecoin products to vie for the settlement circuits pioneered by the crypto industry. The window for AI agent infrastructure is narrower because this time, traditional finance is cutting in from the start.
What Does This Require from Exchanges?
Five years from now, truly important platforms will no longer be defined by token lists or fee schedules; their core competitiveness will be structural:
Unified settlement across asset classes. Traders and agents need a unified margin framework covering cryptocurrencies, stocks, commodities, and any future assets. A fragmented system that sets up separate accounts for each asset class cannot support the speed or combinability required for agent-driven execution. This is why at Phemex, we expanded into TradFi futures, incorporating stocks and precious metals into the same USDT settlement infrastructure as crypto derivatives; this is also why we initiated the AI native revolution, embedding AI as a foundational layer rather than an added feature in our operations and platform architecture.
Smart execution infrastructure. Static order books and manual risk control are designed for a world of human decision-making. As markets become increasingly complex, platforms need systems that can adapt in real-time. This includes AI-driven risk management, adaptive execution, and tools that evolve with the environment instead of lagging behind.
Agents as true participants. This means programmable spending control, machine-readable APIs built for autonomous interaction, and identity frameworks that distinguish human from agent activity without adding friction. No exchange has fully solved this issue yet, but exchanges that start building now will set standards, while those who wait will have to inherit others' architectures.
Looking Ahead
The industry has spent a decade debating ideology.
Centralized versus decentralized. Crypto versus traditional finance. These debates were once necessary.
But their role as the core narrative for the next phase has come to an end.
The next chapter is about building infrastructure that allows all these systems to work together, enabling today's human traders and the intelligent agents soon to work alongside them to truly utilize it.
Our goals are clear:
- Build for what the market is about to become, not what it has been;
- Unified settlement, not fragmented accounts;
- Predictive execution, not static control;
- Architecture prepared for agents, not designed solely for humans.
The industry can wait for traditional finance to define the architecture of the next era.
Or it can take matters into its own hands and pave the way first.
We choose the latter.
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