$50 Billion Opportunity: AI Agent Wallets and a Game of 'Hard to Profit Now'

Source: Tiger Research

Compiled by: BitpushNews

Headlines continue to report on AI Agents autonomously trading and processing payments. However, the cryptocurrency wallet industry has long been laying the groundwork for this. Currently, over ten companies are specifically developing custom wallets for AI Agents. What are they pursuing? What are the potential ultimate returns?

Key Points

• When AI Agents browse the internet and purchase goods or information on behalf of humans, they will ultimately generate thousands of micro-payments, each worth only a few cents. Existing card payment networks (Card Rails) cannot support such small payment scales, making wallets that can automatically split and send funds based on preset conditions crucial.
• Despite the current lack of short-term profitability, companies like Coinbase and Binance are actively building AI wallet infrastructure. This is because it allows them to lock in future customer bases before AI Agents begin large-scale trading. The core focus at this stage is to establish a user base before actual demand explodes.
• Based on calculations from Coinbase's data, the rise in AI Agent usage is expected to bring about a growth of up to seven times its current revenue.
• The accumulated payment records in wallets can demonstrate whether AI Agents are profitable, opening the door for loans based on future earnings—similar to providing credit loans based on the card sales history of small businesses.
• This is still in the stage of "possibility" rather than "proven." AI Agents currently still make operational errors and execute incorrect payments, and the relevant rules vary by country and company, with the legal status of AI Agents still unclear. Therefore, the current competition is not about capturing today's revenue but about positioning advantageously in a large market that is expected to take shape in the coming years.

1. The Rise of AI Agents

Earlier this year, a widely discussed experiment on the prediction market Polymarket provided an AI Agent with $50 in startup capital and allowed it to trade autonomously. The conditions set for the experiment were: if it could not generate profits to cover its API and server costs, it would cease to exist. The Agent subsequently successfully completed trades, and since then, a series of other Agents have begun trading in a similar manner.

Although AI Agents have not yet fully integrated into daily life, there is no doubt that they will be widely applied in the near future.

2. Every Transaction of an Agent Starts with a Wallet

AI Agents have not yet entered the realm of everyday payments. Their most active applications are cryptocurrency trading bots operating within the cryptocurrency ecosystem. These bots operate independently of traditional payment networks, focusing specifically on cryptocurrency trading.

However, in the future, payments will expand into areas that are currently unimaginable. As previously reported, AI is changing the very nature of payments. Once Agents (rather than humans) interact and navigate directly on the web, the amount of each payment will drop sharply. The cost of a single API call or data query could be as low as $0.001, and in extreme cases, even just $0.00001.

To automatically split and send such small payments based on preset conditions without human intervention, a Programmable Payment System is required. This is the background for the emergence of the x402 payment network, with wallets being the foundation for its operation.

However, existing payment networks are designed with "humans" as the transaction subjects.

Credit cards are issued to individual cardholders and operate on a "Chargeback" structure—meaning that when a transaction encounters issues, humans initiate disputes and reverse transactions, with each transaction setting fixed fees of up to several cents. When a person occasionally makes a $20 purchase, this is completely fine; but once an Agent starts sending payments at thousands of transactions per second—even if each API call only costs $0.001 or each data record only costs $0.00001—this payment model becomes economically unfeasible.

The core question is: does the money itself have "programmability"?

Bank cards can automate the input of payment information, but they cannot be programmed to split cash flows, stream payments, or settle instantly based on specific conditions. In contrast, this capability is inherently available on the network where wallets operate. Storing payment details on a card can at best execute transactions on a human scale. Once the economic model shifts to direct transactions between machines, wallets become the only viable starting point.

3. Agents Represent a $50 Billion Business

As shown in the image above, the range of wallet providers is very broad, covering various entities from exchanges to stablecoin issuers. So why are so many diverse participants entering the currently unclear short-term profitability field of Agent wallet infrastructure?

The answer is: these companies are positioning themselves for future revenue and business layout, rather than for today.

Embedding Agent functionality into wallets now is not an initiative that can immediately generate revenue. It builds a foundational capacity to absorb transaction volumes when Agents begin to engage in large-scale activities.

The key is that AI Agents will ultimately operate around the clock in a browserless environment without human intervention. Imagine a user asking an Agent to create a research report. As the Agent gathers information, every time it extracts data from different paid platforms, it will execute a micro-payment. A simple instruction from the user could instantly trigger 20 to 30 payments or even more.

An operation that seems simple and singular to humans, once processed by an AI Agent, will transform into an extremely large volume of payment transactions.

The change in this payment environment will affect company profitability, which can be estimated using publicly available data from Coinbase. This calculation uses Coinbase's 9.2 million monthly trading users (MTU) as a base, rather than its approximately 120 million total registered users.

Combining three variables: adoption rate, average number of Agents per user, and daily call frequency, the following scenario predictions can be derived:

• Conservative scenario (10% adoption rate, 1 Agent per user, 50 calls per day): approximately $84 million in new annual revenue, growing by 1.2%.
• Neutral scenario (50% adoption rate, 2 Agents per user, 200 calls per day): new revenue surges to approximately $3.36 billion, growing by 46.8%.
• Aggressive scenario (100% adoption rate, 3 Agents per user, 1000 calls per day): annual revenue reaches approximately $50.37 billion, about 7 times Coinbase's current total revenue.

What stands out in this comparison is that the gap between these three scenarios expands geometrically rather than arithmetically. The adoption rate itself only grows tenfold (from 10% to 100%), but the resulting revenue gap expands by about 600 times (from $84 million to $50.37 billion).

Because the three variables of "adoption rate," "average number of Agents per user," and "daily call volume" are multiplicative, even a slight increase in any one variable will lead to an exponential rise in the total. Therefore, once Agents achieve widespread adoption and user numbers surge, the resulting revenue stream could reach about 7 times the current total revenue.

This is why Coinbase is vigorously promoting Agent wallet infrastructure even today, despite not having visible revenue. This is to secure its market share when the era of AI Agent-driven transactions arrives.

4. Moving Towards Neobanking for Agents

The transaction data accumulated through wallet infrastructure is not merely a simple record. It lays the foundation for entirely new business models—because the payment history stored in wallets can serve as a credit assessment standard, proving the financial status and operational performance of AI Agents.

Once this data-based credit assessment system is established, wallet providers can naturally expand into next-generation financial services, such as revenue-based financing (RBF) specifically for Agents.

Stripe Capital is a typical example of successfully building new financial businesses on existing payment data. When Stripe launched its loan service Stripe Capital in September 2019, it did not rely on external credit agencies or cumbersome loan documents. It simply used real-time sales data flowing through its own payment network to assess loan eligibility and amounts.

The case of Stripe shows that a company can build high-value financial businesses on its existing data pipeline without establishing a separate sales network or conducting additional marketing expansion.

Agent wallet providers are likely to follow a similar expansion path. By continuously accumulating income data from Agents through wallets, they can create a basis for financing operational funds through RBF and transform into a financial platform focused on Agents to profit from it.

However, building this new business line depends on one prerequisite: AI Agents must evolve beyond simple payment execution tools into asset-holding entities capable of generating their own income and earning enough real revenue to repay loans.

5. This Growth is Currently Unproven

The previously predicted 7-fold revenue growth for Coinbase and the expansion into RBF are based on the optimistic scenario that "Agent payments become widespread." Establishing this system in the real economy still faces significant obstacles.

First, there are still major questions regarding the actual purchase conversion rates and payment reliability of AI Agents. Agents still make operational errors during autonomous ordering, resulting in erroneous payments due to "hallucinations"; sometimes transactions are directly intercepted due to the issuing bank's fraud detection systems (FDS). Therefore, the current actual payment completion rate remains low.

Additionally, payment protocols such as x402, AP2, and MPP remain fragmented and have not unified into a single standard; at the same time, the lack of clear KYC (Know Your Customer) and financial regulatory policies for AI Agents, which are not legal entities, is another major obstacle to further market expansion.

Therefore, the current goal of wallet providers is not short-term fee income. Apple's App Store took 15 years to establish a fee market of $10 billion annually, while WeChat Pay took 7 years to build a massive mini-program ecosystem. Agent wallets are following a similar long-term timeline, focusing on building ecosystems rather than competing for immediate short-term returns.

The current competition is not about today's marginal income. It is about who can first gain control over the flow of funds data in the fully formed agent economy that is expected to take shape in five to ten years.