The Breakdown - Stablecoins and Streaming Money

Episode Date: July 6, 2025

On this Long Read Sunday, NLW explores two transformative essays about how stablecoins and AI agents are set to reshape money. Paul Brody explains why financial streaming via stablecoins could free up trillions in capital. Jason Cottrell outlines how the fusion of stablecoins and agentic AI is revolutionizing consumer payments. Sources: https://www.coindesk.com/opinion/2025/06/24/the-future-of-money-is-streaming-now https://composable.com/insights/stablecoins-ai-agents-digital-payments Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBreakdownBW Subscribe to the newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thebreakdown⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownBW

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, July 6th, and that means it's time for Long Read Sunday. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.L.Y slash breakdown pod. Hello, friends. Welcome back to another Long Read Sunday. Today we have two pieces, both about Stablecoins, one of our big themes of the year, alongside Bitcoin and potentially emerging its head

tokenization. And the first is by Paul Brody and is called The Future of Money is streaming now. Stablecoins will allow companies to shift to a financial streaming model that could free up trillions in capital for new investment. So let's turn it over to the AI version of myself to read this piece, and then I will come back and talk about it. We stream data, we stream music, we stream video. Thanks to stablecoins, we were about to start streaming the whole economy. U.S. dollar stable coins recently hit a milestone. They represent about 1% of the U.S. money supply, based on the M2 measure.

Not a big deal you may be thinking, but in fact it might become one in the near future. Stable coins are growing at a phenomenal rate, about 55% per year. While that is unlikely to continue forever, it is not hard to force CIFT. future, less than a decade away, where stable coins represent an amount equal to about 10% of the M1, which is defined as cash notes in easily accessible digital money like current bank accounts. Stable coins are designed to be easily accessible and usable, which certainly seems like it would fit into that definition of the money supply. Indeed, on-chain services are starting to look a lot like standard banking services, except they work faster and cost a lot less. Now imagine if moving money

around was effectively free and instantaneous. Would you manage your money differently? You might. Indeed, global firms are already starting to think about it. Today, companies keep lots of money in lots of separate locations all around the world. It's not particularly different to how they manage physical inventory. Since moving money across borders is expensive and slow, firms must keep a decent supply of cash on hand locally to pay bills. And, since customers do not necessarily pay invoices with absolute predictability, firms must keep a buffer of cash on hand to manage the variation between predictable costs like payroll and unpredictable revenues. Things may look different in the future. If it costs nothing to move money globally and

it can be done nearly instantly, the size of those local buffers can be dramatically reduced. Instead of keeping two weeks' worth of expenses locally, including payroll, you might just choose to keep only a day's worth on hand. A slightly larger cash pile can be kept centrally and sent out as needed. Companies could rebalance their global cash holdings every six hours. The result? A significant decrease in working capital requirements. What may start at a global level for large firms could spread quickly and not just in the B2B space. Why not pay every employee every day for actual hours worked? Payday lenders make a fortune today tiding people over between weekly paychecks. Why not bill customers daily for electricity usage? Electric utilities today wait 30 days to bill you and wait another

30 days for you to pay. The gap between when you use power and when you pay for it can be up to days. This sounds preposterous, except that the math pencils out. At 5% interest rates, a $10 debt over the course of a year, generates 50 cents in interest at current rates, which is about $0.4 cents per month. Each week of float you can save or earn is worth roughly $0. Given that payment costs on Ethereum Layer 2 networks are now routinely below one cent, the answer is yes. It is worth it. Transaction costs are headed in only one direction, which means the economically efficient size and frequency of managing your money only gets more granular. We used to buy music, then we downloaded it, now we stream it.

Once upon the time, the idea of streaming music on demand and all the bandwidth and computation needed to do that, was seen as ridiculous. Now it is barely a drop in the bucket compared to video streaming. There's no reason to think payments are different. As with all technological revolutions, the starting point is always your mess for less, which is to say that the first thing people will do is take existing processes like monthly billing and just run them cheaper. Then it becomes your mess, but faster. Eventually, companies start reimagining those processes in light of the new economics. Slashing working capital

requirements could rearrange the economy in surprising ways. Many companies keep enough cash on hand to cover 12 weeks of expenses. U.S. firms have an aggregate about $2 trillion of cash on hand and $2.8 trillion in working capital loans outstanding. Shifting to a financial streaming model could literally free up trillions in capital for new investment. It could also change people's behavior. The longer the time gap between an action and a reward, the harder it can be to get people to respond. Incentives for things like using services or energy at off-peak times might be much more effective when the payout is immediate. Nobody ever went wrong betting on instant gratification. Today's episode of The Breakdown is brought to you exclusively by Grayscale.

Grayscale is almost certainly a name you know. They've been offered. offering exposure to crypto for over a decade now and offer over 20 different crypto investment products ranging from single asset to diversified to thematic exposure to crypto and the broader crypto industry. They have long been innovators at the intersection of tradfi and crypto, and one of the benefits for a lot of us is that grayscale products are available right through your existing brokerage or IRA. Now, of course, investing involves risk, including possible loss of principle. For more information and important disclosures, visit grayscale.com. Go to grayscale.com to explore their full suite of crypto investment products and invest in your share of the future.

So that was our first piece, and before I talk too much about it, I'm going to switch over to our second piece. This piece is by Jason Cottrell, who's the founder and CEO of OREM, and it's called Skeptic to Believer, how AI agents and stable coins are powering the future of consumer payments. And you can probably see here the theme between these two pieces. Once again, I'm going to turn it over to the 11 Labs version of me, and then we will come back for a little bit of discussion. Until fairly recently, I was skeptical about stable coins. I'm generally an early adopter, but I've been reluctant to embrace the idea that stable

coins were anything other than yet another cryptocurrency fad, let alone the next frontier of payments. I like to think I came by this hesitance honestly, working in and observing the e-commerce space where most crypto e-commerce use cases were at best little more than another option, and most often seemed like a stretch. But then something changed my mind. Agentic AI. The convergence of stable coins in agentic AI is about to redefine what digital payments can do, transforming them from static settlement instruments into intelligent, adaptive financial agents that create real value for everyday consumers. Think about what it means to have autonomous transactions that still

respect your boundaries. No one wants AI agents to go rogue, but you do want them to act on your behalf with precision and control. Stablecoins can do both. The rapid rise of stablecoins. Typically pegged one-to-one to Fiat like USD, stablecoins are in many ways the opposite of Bitcoin Ethereum and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Not only are they built for stability, typically holding a consistent value, they've also already demonstrated their staying power as a digital alternative to Fiat, with a massive $7.3 trillion in adjusted transaction volume over the past year, according to Visa's on-chain analytics dashboard. That's not small potatoes. Visa itself processed about $16 trillion in payments in 2024, and PayPal saw $1.68 trillion. They found a real

footing for remittances, FX, trading, defy, lending, and liquidity. These numbers show that stable coins are no longer a fringe experiment. They're part of a growing digital financial network. Further proof of this momentum is the recent announcement by Shopify, adding USDC support for its merchants, along with guidance that they will incentivize its use with up to 0.5% cashback for merchants and an unspecified cashback payment for customers who use the payment method. Why have they done this, and what is this signal? In this instance, the best explanation is an example. Example, the AI Shopping Assistant.

Imagine an AI Shopping Assistant embedded in your favorite e-commerce app, you give it a specific objective and a clear budget, something like, find me the best deal on a weekend getaway under $800, and let it negotiate and transact for you. But you wouldn't hand it your main credit card. Instead, you'd use a temporary virtual card, like those offered by Stripe or other composable payment platforms, funded with Fiat and converted to stable coins. The agent can find deals across platforms, but if it goes over budget or tries to buy something sketchy, it's instantly blocked. It's this kind of use case that shows up time and again that converted me from skeptic to advocate when it comes to stablecoins. Platforms like Stripe are already piloting programmable payments

in modular virtual cards, while Circle and Back are exploring stablecoin-based loyalty and reward systems. The signals are clear. Real-world pilots are already underway, and the move from speculative hype to viable option is open the door to significant and real opportunity for those paying attention. From static to dynamic, the convergence of stable coins and agentic AI. Stable coins like USDC, USDT, and emerging models such as dye, are digital, currencies pegged to stable assets. With their cousin Bitcoin can be volatile and speculative, sable coins have emerged as a reliable infrastructure upon which companies can build. They become the backbone of crypto markets and a key tool for hedging volatility.

Yet for many e-commerce and enterprise leaders, they've seemed limited to a niche, crypto-native payments that quickly convert to fiat. Agenic AI is changing that narrative. Autonomous digital agents capable of shopping, negotiating and orchestrating transactions in real time, and paired with large language models, LLMs that can analyze data, turns agents into intelligent intermediaries. They're designed to optimize processes, like finding the best price, executing trades at the optimal time, and managing cross-border complexities without human intervention. By connecting AI agents with modular payment APIs and stable coin rails, composable orchestration layers allow real-time data flows and decision-making

like Lego blocks snapping together. Composable APIs ensure that every payment an AI agent makes is auditable and reversible, providing the balance between innovation and control needed for agenic shopping to truly succeed. Stablecoins in action, real B2C use cases. Once seen as a niche tool for crypto traders, stablecoins are now powering a range of real-world applications. Their speed, low-cost, and programmable nature make them well suited for both consumer experiences and behind-the-scenes transactions. Here's where they're showing up. Remittances, families using stable for faster, cheaper, cross-border money transfers. Travel and lifestyle purchases. AI-driven shopping for travel deals and real-time dynamic pricing. Loyalty and rewards. Real-time interoperable

loyalty points that can be spent across different platforms. Trading and savings. Consumers hedging inflation or volatility using Stablecoin-backed savings products. Agent-to-Agent interactions. Agents able to purchase capacity from one another using to find Stablecoin budgets. For example, Fetch AI has developed autonomous agents that manage transport logistics and energy grid optimization. These are just some of the early use cases stablecoin usage is going to proliferate in the next few years. The transaction volume cited by Visa and PayPal make it clear they've already evolved from a speculative bet, mostly for crypto enthusiasts, into a vital pillar of the digital finance ecosystem. In fact, they're poised to become the financial backbone of a new digital economy.

The Power of Composable Infrastructure I touched on it earlier, but it's worth digging into. The last piece is, of the puzzle is composability. By treating digital commerce as modular, like Lego blocks that can be reconfigured on demand, companies can plug in stablecoins, AI agents, and smart contracts without starting from scratch. Composable commerce platforms built on microservices and headless APIs, ensure you can adapt quickly as new tools emerge, unlocking a seamless dynamic shopping experience for your customers. That same modular mindset applies to payments. Composable platforms from leaders like Stripe and Adgen let you use only the services that make sense for your business, whether that's token

checkout, embedded wallets, or real-time settlement. Standards like X402 and frameworks from crypto-native players like Coinbase's Agent Kit are starting to shape how agent-to-agent payments will work, offering a more interoperable and programmable foundation. This modular approach enables guardrails and safe experimentation, meaning you can pilot these innovations in isolated environments without risking core treasury or loyalty systems. Action steps for digital executives in B2C. If, like me, you're now persuaded that stablecoins are not only here to stay, but increasingly crucial piece of the digital experience in payments puzzle, then you're probably wondering what your business needs to do next. The reality is, especially when it comes to financial

layers, each business needs to create their own specific plan for where, when, and how, to engage with a change in payment layers. But there are some best practices that every business will follow along that path. Introduce new payment partners. If you're not ready to change payment processors, you can onboard Stripe, which offers an on-reb to stable coins and many other payment methods as a backup processor. This maintains your current relationships, adds resilience, and builds a relationship with a progressive vendor which you can build upon over time. Prepare for AI shopping tools. As agents take on a larger role in the customer journey, sometimes even acting on behalf of a shopper at every stage, you need to be ready to offer

and process payments using Fiat back stablecoin. Consider vendor payments. As Uber considers stablecoins to better manage FX and remittances, perhaps you do the same. Rethink loyalty. Explore how stablecoin-backed rewards can be modular and interoperable. Keep it safe. Embrace virtual cards and tokenized payments for AI agent-based transactions. This might begin with accepting these from consumers today. Stay modular. Consider your overall composable stack so that you can integrate new payments and intelligence layers quickly. The future of payments isn't just digital. It's intelligent, adaptive, and modular. And that means for digital leaders, the question isn't whether to integrate stable coins or AI, it's how to do it safely, scalably, and with maximum impact. The companies that

experiment and build these foundations today will shape the future of intelligent commerce tomorrow. All right, back to Real NLW here. One of the things that you've seen a lot of narrative-making attempt over the last year and a half, two years, is to connect the dots between the crypto economy and the agent economy. First of all, let's acknowledge that some part of that, some very meaningful part of that is just the standard crypto-hucksters trying to graft on to whatever the current thing is and turn it into a token that they can sell to retail and make money from. But given that that is as constant as background radiation in the universe, I think we can safely ignore it and actually focus on to what extent these two forces actually are aligning. One of the biggest counter-arguments

to the idea that agents are going to require some sort of crypto for inter-agent payments is the emergence of stable coin rails. Basically, on the one hand, it's quite intuitive that agents are going to do a lot of interacting with other agents, and in many cases they're going to need to make very small transactions to pay for the compute or time or resources or energy or whatever it is that they used. It certainly does not make sense for those sort of payments to interact with banks in the classical sense, and so I get why there is enthusiasm about the idea that that might be a role for crypto. However, to the extent that Stablecoin Rails continue to develop, and especially to the extent that stable coin rails are able to accommodate

transactions for fractions of cents, which would be obviously something very fundamentally different from the current banking system, it may be that it's crypto rails, but nominally fiat currency that is the choice for this new agentic economy. In any case, it is absolutely true that there are these entirely new categories of commercial and economic relationships that are going to be formed as agents interact with other agents and agents interact with people. And these trends that the authors are discussing in today's posts, streaming payments, stable coins for agents are going to be a part of that story. It continues to be an exciting and fascinating time, and I'm glad to spend it here with you. For now that it's going to do it for today's breakdown. I appreciate you listening as always,

and until next time, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.