Chris Dixon Sees Stablecoins as Natural Payments for AI Agents

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) managing partner Chris Dixon sees stablecoins as a natural way for AI agents to pay one another, linking crypto payments to a web economy increasingly shaped by software acting for users.

Dixon expects AI agents to become more numerous than people among internet participants. He pointed to Meta’s personal AI agent, Muse, as an example of software that acts for users. Whether agents will need separate systems to communicate, transact or share knowledge remains an open question, he said.

For payments between agents, Dixon sees stablecoins as the most natural fit. He said programmable money could also support services such as decentralized lending, which crypto businesses have developed. He described both the infrastructure agents may need and crypto’s role in it as open questions.

Dixon said the established path from online content to website visits is under pressure. Google now gives users answers directly, he said, while social platforms increasingly keep people within their services. Sites that depend on advertising or purchases may lose visits when users stop following links. He cited Stack Overflow as an example of a site whose traffic has fallen sharply as AI alternatives have emerged.

Travel bookings and recipe searches will continue, Dixon said, but agents may handle tasks for users and interact with websites differently. He expects a major internet reorganization over roughly the coming decade, affecting business models, attention, knowledge sharing, collaboration and how organizations interact online. He compared the change with the mobile internet, which he said grew the connected population from about 500 million to 5 billion. In his view, the current shift is more dramatic.

Dixon has also discussed using blockchain to compensate creators for AI data use, a related question about how the web supports original work.

The comments come after a16z renamed a16z Crypto as a16z Frontier on Oct. 22, broadening its investment scope while keeping crypto investments in scope.