Crypto bank Anchorage Digital has introduced a new agentic banking service aimed at enabling AI agents to access and move funds autonomously—an opportunity its co-founder believes could evolve into a trillion-dollar market.
In a post on X, CEO Nathan McCauley said the platform allows AI agents to interact with both traditional financial systems and crypto payment rails.
The move comes as blockchain and fintech firms race to prepare for the rise of agent-driven commerce. Earlier this year, Stripe noted that blockchains may eventually need to handle anywhere from 1 million to 1 billion transactions per second to support the scale of AI-powered activity.
“Institutions are experimenting with automation across treasury, payments, and procurement, but they’re doing it on systems that weren’t built for non-human actors,” McCauley said.
Anchorage’s new service equips AI agents with verifiable digital identities, along with configurable spending limits, permissions, and policy controls, plus audit features to help meet regulatory requirements.
The launch also includes a partnership with Google Cloud, which will provide the intelligence layer enabling AI agents to discover, negotiate, and coordinate transactions with one another.
Ripple Labs researcher and former head of product marketing Oliver Segovia said the partnership signals a broader shift toward closer collaboration between tech labs and regulated financial institutions.
“Hyperscalers have traditionally viewed banks as top-tier enterprise clients, but going forward, we’re likely to see deeper alliances as tech firms expand into regulated infrastructure and banks build intelligence layers on top of their core systems,” he wrote on X.
Speaking at the Consensus 2026 in Miami, Nathan McCauley described agentic finance as one of the defining trends of the next decade.
“This is shaping up to be a trillion-dollar industry, where agents will pay each other, transact with merchants, and even earn income independently,” he said.
Agentic finance is already gaining traction across the crypto space. On April 30, Tether-backed wallet startup Oobit launched a Visa-supported virtual card that allows AI agents to make online purchases using USDT without human intervention.
These cards are funded directly from Tether’s treasury, enabling agents to continuously deploy capital without relying on fiat on-ramps or manual top-ups.
