Forget The AI Bubble — Ex-Morgan Stanley Executive Says Billions Of AI Agents Will Drive Crypto’s Next Boom

A Wall Street veteran thinks stablecoins, tokenized assets, and cryptographic identity systems will become more important as AI agents.

• Jordi Visser said AI and crypto are converging, and digital assets will be the financial infrastructure for autonomous AI agents.
• Wall Street is underestimating the adoption of AI by counting companies like OpenAI as one customer, rather than platforms that serve millions of AI agents, he said.
• Visser believes that today’s banking and payments systems are too slow and fragmented to enable machine-to-machine commerce at scale.

Wall Street veteran Jordi Visser said he was focused squarely on the intersection of AI and crypto, two technologies he believes most investors, technologists, and commentators still wrongly treat as separate stories.

The defining role of crypto in the years ahead will be as the financial infrastructure for a forthcoming population of autonomous AI agents transacting continuously at machine speed, Visser said in a Substack post on Monday.

Visser is a macro strategist and head of AI Macro Research at 22V Research, and previously served as CIO at Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers after serving 11 years as a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley (MS). Previously, he also called out the AI bubble, saying that Bitcoin (BTC) would stand to benefit from it. 

Bitcoin’s price was up over 3% during the past 24 hours. On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment around BTC shifted to ‘neutral’ from the ‘bullish’ zone, while chatter around it remained in the ‘low’ levels over the past day.

Why The Real AI Customer Base Is Being Undercounted

Visser said Wall Street is miscounting AI’s true customer base, using McDonald’s “Billions Served” framing. He argued that investors see OpenAI (OPEAXXZ), Anthropic (ANTHZZX), and Google (GOOG/GOOGL) as individual cloud customers, when in fact all three are becoming an operating system for a growing population of AI agents doing research, coding, and financial work. So the real installed base, and the transaction volume it generates, is being massively undercounted.

He said the financial system is built around human banking hours, manual approvals, and delayed settlement, friction that’s manageable when humans begin transactions but becomes an impossible roadblock once billions of agents transact continuously, in some cases paying fractions of a cent thousands of times within a single workflow. 

Stablecoins Could Become Internet’s Payment Rail 

The payments industry is already preparing for checkouts initiated by software rather than humans, Visser said, citing Stripe's rumored bid for PayPal (PYPL) as evidence. Stripe has developed transaction-specific credentials for authorized agent purchases, he said, while PayPal is bringing its PYUSD stablecoin and consumer wallet network to a potential combined platform. 

Visser expects that because agents are global by design and agnostic to banking relationships, they will send payments to whichever rail provides the best execution speed, cost and settlement certainty, a thesis he said will drive stablecoin and tokenized-asset adoption. 

Banks Weren't Built For Billions Of Agents

He also added that identity and reputation will become as important as the money itself, with counterparties requiring cryptographic proof that an agent is authorized to act and spend on behalf of a person, company or another agent. Vissers’s comments are not new. Previously, Coinbase (COIN) CEO Brian Armstrong had reiterated the same message, saying banking rails weren’t efficient enough for AI agents. 

The token market that accompanies this thesis is still small compared to the overall crypto market. AI-agent and agent-launchpad tokens have a combined market cap of roughly $4.7 billion, a tiny fraction of 1% of the total crypto market valuation of around $1.3 trillion, as per CoinGecko. 

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