Most of the stablecoins in circulation—such as USDC and USDT—are backed by fiat reserves and issued by centralised organisations. This model has been crucial for driving widespread adoption. Still, it also ties stablecoins to legacy systems: regulated custodial accounts, potential intervention points, and centralised control over freezing or blocking funds.
While these constraints make sense in traditional finance, they are fundamentally at odds with the emerging reality of machine-to-machine (M2M) commerce. Autonomous agents don’t hold bank accounts or operate on bankers’ hours. They function in decentralised ecosystems that require uninterrupted access to liquid, programmable currency, without depending on a human to approve every transaction.
Even algorithmic stablecoins, which were developed to address some of these issues, have faced challenges. The collapse of Terra’s UST highlighted how fragile overly complex or poorly collateralised systems can be. For machines operating autonomously, reliability must be built in from the ground up, without single points of failure.
Machines Need Money Designed for Their World
Machine agents are increasingly participating in various economic activities, including renting computing power, trading digital assets, and licensing data. For these applications to scale, they require a form of currency that’s trustless, censorship-resistant, and fully on-chain, allowing smart contracts to interact with it directly without relying on any central intermediary.
In other words, the ideal financial infrastructure for autonomous systems should work more like an operating system primitive: always accessible, transparent, and programmable by design.
Decentralised AI marketplaces are already emerging, enabling agents to buy and sell services automatically. As forecasts suggest the AI economy could exceed $230 billion within the next decade, the need for stable, machine-compatible currencies is only going to intensify.
Policy Caution May Be Holding Back Innovation
In the United States, policymakers have made progress towards clearer regulations, with bills like the GENIUS Act outlining frameworks for digital assets. But many of these efforts mirror the traditional banking model—prioritising safety and familiarity over experimentation. The result is something like a global banking app: slow-moving, risk-averse, and not particularly well-suited to the demands of autonomous finance.
This approach leaves little room to explore innovative forms of programmable money or to create decentralised, project-based stablecoins that can adapt to different ecosystems.
When decentralised networks can issue their stable assets—collateralised by their native tokens—it creates powerful incentives and feedback loops. Users get a stable medium of exchange, projects can cover costs without constantly liquidating their treasuries, and the value remains inside the ecosystem rather than flowing out.
A New Era of Ecosystem-Linked Stablecoins
Momentum is growing behind what could be called machine-native stablecoins: digital assets explicitly designed to serve autonomous agents and decentralised protocols. These tokens are typically collateralised with decentralised reserves, issued via smart contracts, and deeply integrated into core protocol operations.
This model transforms M2M payments into self-reinforcing economic systems. When contributors are paid in stable assets backed by the protocol’s value, selling pressure on native tokens diminishes, and the network becomes more sustainable.
This isn’t about eliminating fiat entirely—it’s about unlocking a new class of programmable currency that can support next-generation applications, including distributed compute markets, agent-to-agent transactions, and autonomous service provisioning.
Machines Deserve Their Own Money
The stablecoin sector has evolved at remarkable speed. But its fundamental assumptions still revolve around human users—our behaviours, our oversight, and our priorities. As we move towards a future where autonomous agents transact independently, these assumptions will need to change.
Finance is no longer just about peer-to-peer interactions. It’s increasingly about machine-to-machine economies, and if we want to harness their potential, we’ll need stablecoins explicitly built for that purpose—currencies machines can rely on, integrate with, and scale alongside.
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