AI agentic economy fails on blockchain…unless it’s BSV

Here are some large-scale but simple math problems: If there are trillions of AI agents performing trillions of transactions every day, which blockchain will they prefer? If a large percentage of those transactions are paying one cent or less, which blockchain costs the least to use?

The answer is that they’ll use the blockchain that scales to fit these expectations. The highest possible transaction throughput will matter. Economic outcomes will matter. On-chain final settlement will matter. What doesn’t matter to AI agents are considerations like ideology and “crypto community” opinions. They’ll optimize and find the best tool to complete the tasks they need to perform.

AI agents, or autonomous software that acts on your behalf, are getting their own wallets. They’re designed so machines can pay each other at high speed, without human approval. Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) just released “Agentic Wallets” built on their x402 protocol, which hold USDC balances and trade other assets.

This article isn’t about the security or societal implications of this change (there are many), but we need to talk about the economics.

The headlines are focusing on Coinbase, but developers are already pointing out the scalability wall. Agentic Wallets can handle today’s transaction needs, but what about tomorrow’s?

Developer John Calhoon laid the future out in detail in a recent X post. Agentic Wallets got Coinbase a ton of attention, Stripe now has x402 payments on Base (Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer-2 network), and Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) released “AP2” with a group of major credit card and payments services.

But here’s the problem: these kinds of “internet native” high-volume services still have plenty of middlemen looking to take their cut. Most blockchain networks are too slow to handle all these transactions on-chain, so they’re offloaded to payment layers. This introduces new potential points of failure.

Coinbase’s Base can handle today’s agentic wallet transaction volumes, John Calhoon wrote, but it’s not ready for what’s coming. It’s a million agent payments in 2.5 hours on Base vs. just one second on BSV (with Teranode).

Then there’s a 7-day withdrawal window from Base to Ethereum, since it’s a Layer-2 service. Base relies on a centralized sequencer, which has stuttered and stopped a few times in the past year. If a blockchain can scale natively on its base layer, these extra steps shouldn’t be necessary.

This becomes more meaningful as more agents and the transactions they perform multiply. We’re no longer talking millions of payments per second, but exponentially more.

“In the agentic economy, the opportunity lies in selling to trillions of AI agents rather than billions of humans, unlocking markets orders of magnitude larger through nonstop micro-transactions,” Calhoon told CoinGeek.

“BSV excels here by enabling the lowest fees (fractions of a penny) and handling millions per second, positioning it to win the race to zero costs as trillions of agents perform trillions of transactions daily. This week, we’re launching a Claude Code BSV agent marketplace with more than 10 agents to choose from, and we imagine there will be thousands by the end of the year.”

The x402 protocol is built to handle the HTTP “402 Payment Required” page, referring to the internet’s intended native payments layer that never got implemented. x402 is a step towards implementing it, but it still won’t be useful unless payments can be made at volumes the future will demand.

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And yes, developers are building BSV solutions to this.

In the high-volume digital economy that’s coming, AIs using agentic wallets won’t just trade. They’ll be doing machine-to-machine transactions for all kinds of things, like accessing multiple online services, or making micropayments for API access and code snippets. Even if you’re not a developer, you’ll probably have some form of agentic wallet handling electronic payments for you in the background.

AI agents will seek the most optimized solutions, meaning high volume and low cost. If the decision on which blockchain does the job best is left to machines, rather than humans, they’ll likely perform a quick analysis and choose BSV.

They don’t care about hash wars, favorite founders, or which chain has better memes. They will prioritize raw throughput and cost per transaction. If it’s attempting to make 100,000 micropayments in an hour, even a $1 fee on a one-cent transaction breaks the entire model.

An agentic wallet may not care whether its transactions occur on-chain or on a payments layer, but it will definitely notice if something fails in a layered structure. Users will see if there are human-scale delays in settling and accessing funds.

The digital economy of the future will be dominated by agentic actors operating on a scale unfamiliar to humans. Tiny fractions of a cent, a million times or more per second. The items they’re paying for will also seem unfamiliar to humans, but they’ll make perfect sense to a machine.

Slow, unscalable blockchains with high fees are for humans to speculate on market value to earn dollars. Scalable blockchains like BSV are built with future needs in mind and that future will arrive faster than we think.

In order for artificial intelligence (AI) to work right within the law and thrive in the face of growing challenges, it needs to integrate an enterprise blockchain system that ensures data input quality and ownership—allowing it to keep data safe while also guaranteeing the immutability of data. Check out CoinGeek’s coverage on this emerging tech to learn more why Enterprise blockchain will be the backbone of AI.

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