Forget pipelines, critical minerals and railways—Stand with Crypto, a Coinbase-linked lobby group, wants Canada to be a leader in putting bots on the blockchain. 

Bots are best: In a report sent to members of Parliament Thursday, Stand with Crypto argued blockchain wallets are the easiest and cheapest way for AI agents to spend money, and Canada is well-positioned to be a leader in this new market. AI agents like Instinct and Meta’s Muse can already buy things for their human users using Stripe’s Link wallet, which lets them spend money using credit cards or the USDC stablecoin, a crypto token pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar. Stripe, Coinbase and Shopify back the x402 protocol, a payments standard that lets AI agents buy things with stablecoins without prompting their human users to fill out payment information. Those three companies also teamed up last year to help Shopify merchants accept  USDC.

McKinsey predicts agentic commerce is about to take off, forecasting that AI agents will be involved in US$3 trillion to US$5 trillion worth of transactions by 2030. The x402 protocol has a long way to go before it gets anywhere close to that, processing about US$24 million over the last 30 days. In an email, Coinbase head of Canada Eric Richmond said regulations that clarify stablecoins are payment instruments, not investments, “would give more Canadian businesses the confidence” to offer stablecoin payments for AI agents.

Still trying to make micropayments happen: By building infrastructure for AI agents to make stablecoin payments, Coinbase is trying to realize a long-held dream. Crypto boosters have long touted blockchain’s potential usefulness for micropayments, tiny transactions that are too small to justify credit card processing fees. With the x402 protocol, Coinbase is betting that AI agents will finally get that idea off the ground. Speaking onstage at Stripe’s annual conference in April, Coinbase chief business officer Shan Aggarwal said he doesn’t expect stablecoins to replace cards, but thinks they will be the payment method of choice for AI agents buying things from other machines because they settle instantly, globally and around the clock. In an April post, Andreessen Horowitz partner Noah Levine posed a hypothetical example of a developer who makes a tool that aggregates public companies’ financial data. The developer could make money by charging AI agents a fraction of a cent every time they pull data from it, paid in stablecoins.

What could go wrong? Not everyone thinks letting AI agents loose on the blockchain is a great idea. There have already been reports of AI agents armed with credit cards making expensive mistakes, such as costing a user hundreds of dollars by cancelling a flight without first getting permission to pay the cancellation fee. Stablecoin payments are irreversible, which would make correcting such mistakes difficult. 

Stablecoins are widely used in illicit financial transactions, and money-laundering detection systems aren’t built for AI agents making hundreds of transactions an hour. Additionally, things can get weird fast when AI and crypto mix. In 2024, prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreessen gave US$50,000 worth of bitcoin to an experimental AI bot called Truth Terminal, which went on to become a millionaire by promoting a meme coin.

Richmond said AI agents “shouldn’t have open-ended access to anyone’s money,” and that spending caps and human sign-offs are key. Money laundering can be easier to trace on blockchains because they keep a public record of transactions, he said.

Even bots need regulatory certainty: The Stand with Crypto report says clear regulations will be key to helping Canada take advantage of the opportunity agentic commerce poses. The Canadian Shield Institute, a sovereignty-focused think tank, argues Ottawa should regulate agentic commerce under the Bank Act, treating it as a matter of systemic importance to the safety of the financial system. Ottawa is in the process of drafting the regulations that will govern federal stablecoin legislation, which Stand with Crypto said will also be important if Canada is to take a leading role in agentic commerce.