What AI Agents Need from Crypto Exchanges

By Federico Variola, CEO of Phemex

On February 11, Coinbase launched Agentic Wallets, the first wallet infrastructure built specifically for AI agents. The same week, Stripe introduced machine payments using USDC stablecoins. Visa, PayPal, and Mastercard all announced or expanded agentic commerce initiatives. In the span of a few days, the largest payments companies in the world decided that software needs its own money.

This did not happen in isolation. Stablecoin supply has crossed $300 billion. Settlement happens in seconds. Smart contracts can hold, move, and allocate capital without a human in the loop.

For anyone running an exchange, this changes the conversation. The question is no longer whether AI agents will participate in financial markets. It is whether exchanges are building for that participation, or watching it happen from the outside.

The Platform Shift Already Happened

Centralized platforms started as order books for Bitcoin. They added perpetuals, then lending, staking, copy trading, on-chain token access, and now traditional financial assets. Users on major exchanges can trade stock futures, precious metals, and crypto derivatives from the same margin account, settled in the same stablecoin, at any hour. That is no longer an exchange in the traditional sense. It is a full financial interface, and the competitive benchmark is no longer Binance or OKX. It is anything that lets someone move capital efficiently.

The decentralized side moved just as fast. Hyperliquid processes billions in daily perpetual volume on its own Layer 1 with execution that rivals centralized venues. Lighter launched on-chain perpetuals for Samsung and Hyundai stock with 10x leverage. Jupiter integrated Polymarket directly into its DEX, bringing prediction markets to Solana users without requiring them to bridge assets or leave the app. The DEX-to-CEX perpetual volume ratio tripled in 2025, from roughly 6 percent to nearly 19 percent.

Both sides are converging toward the same outcome: access to any market, any asset, at any time. The centralized-versus-decentralized debate is no longer a useful organizing principle. What separates the next generation of platforms is not which markets they list. It is how intelligently they operate.

Where AI Agents Hit a Wall

We have global, programmable financial infrastructure. Stablecoin rails that process trillions annually. Smart contracts that execute complex strategies without human intervention. Yet the most capable AI agents today still cannot independently execute a trade, pay for compute, or rebalance a portfolio without someone clicking “confirm.”

Coinbase took a meaningful step with Agentic Wallets. Their x402 protocol has processed over 50 million machine-to-machine transactions, and agents can now hold funds, trade tokens, and transact on-chain autonomously. But beyond Coinbase, the infrastructure barely exists. Most exchanges have no framework for agent-driven execution. No identity layer for non-human actors. No spending controls designed for software that runs continuously and makes thousands of micro-decisions per hour.

Circle’s CEO has predicted that billions of AI agents will transact with stablecoins within three to five years. Google launched a Universal Commerce Protocol for agentic transactions. Projects like Kite are building entire blockchains around cryptographic identity and governance for autonomous systems.

Traditional finance is not waiting for crypto to figure this out. Banks and payment processors are already building agent infrastructure on their own terms. Once institutional capital flows through those proprietary systems, it does not come back.

Why Crypto Should Be the Default

Every feature that makes crypto inconvenient for the average retail user is what makes it ideal for software. AI agents do not need customer support or polished interfaces. They need permissionless settlement, programmable money, and rails that never close. Crypto already built that.

The problem is not capability. It is focus.

Most exchanges still think of their platforms as serving human traders who log in, place orders, and log out. The next cycle will be shaped by platforms that serve both human traders and autonomous agents within the same environment, across crypto and traditional assets simultaneously.

I have seen this pattern before. When stablecoins first gained traction, exchanges dismissed them as niche instruments for trading desks. Crypto built the dominant stablecoins, USDT and USDC still represent the overwhelming majority of the market, but the industry was slow to treat them as foundational infrastructure. That delay gave banks an opening. Now they are launching their own stablecoin products, competing for the same settlement rails crypto pioneered. The window for AI agent infrastructure is narrower, because this time traditional finance is moving in from the start.

What This Demands from Exchanges

The platforms that matter in five years will not be defined by token listings or fee schedules. The differentiators are structural.

Unified settlement across asset classes. Traders and agents need one margin framework that covers crypto, equities, commodities, and whatever comes next. Fragmented systems with separate accounts for each asset class cannot support the speed or composability that agent-driven execution requires. At Phemex, this is why we expanded into TradFi futures, bringing stocks and precious metals into the same USDT-settled infrastructure as our crypto derivatives, and why we launched our AI-Native Revolution, embedding artificial intelligence across operations and platform architecture as a foundational layer rather than an added feature.

Intelligent execution infrastructure. Static order books and manual risk controls were designed for a world where humans make every decision. As markets grow more complex, platforms need systems that adapt in real time. AI-driven risk management, adaptive execution, and tools that evolve with conditions rather than lag behind them.

Agents as real participants. That means programmable spending controls, machine-readable APIs built for autonomous interaction, and identity frameworks that distinguish between human and agent activity without adding friction to either. No exchange has fully solved this yet. But the ones that start building now will set the standard. The ones that wait will inherit someone else’s architecture.

What Comes Next

The industry spent a decade on ideology. Centralized versus decentralized. Crypto versus TradFi. Those debates were necessary. They are also over as organizing principles for what comes next.

The next chapter is about building infrastructure that makes all of these systems work together, and makes them accessible to the humans trading today and the agents that will operate alongside them.

At Phemex, our commitment is straightforward. Build for what markets are becoming, not for what they were. Unified settlement over fragmented accounts. Predictive execution over static controls. Agent-ready architecture over human-only design.

The industry can wait for traditional finance to define the next architecture, or it can build it first.

We choose the latter.