Trumps’ World Liberty Financial teases AI agent tech for USD1 as stablecoins near $315bn

The Trump family’s crypto startup is rewiring how machines pay.

Zak Folkman, a co-founder of World Liberty Financial, teased on Wednesday that the stablecoin issuer is preparing a major push into agentic artificial intelligence payments.

This would position its USD1 stablecoin for a future where autonomous software agents transact at machine speed.

“We’ve been building in the background,” Folkman said.

“Some very exciting updates coming that will completely change how people think about AI agents making autonomous payments,” he said.

Other developers at the project confirmed that World Liberty Financial is “already developing AI Agents capable of making autonomous payments.”

World Liberty Financial’s new push into the crossover between AI and cryptocurrency comes amid a broader rush to build infrastructure for AI-driven online commerce using stablecoins.

US President Donald Trump, who is a co-founder emeritus of World Liberty Financial, has repeatedly championed stablecoin innovation as part of his vision to make the US the “crypto capital of the world.”

Stablecoins swell

The stablecoin market has swelled to nearly $315 billion, according to DefiLlama data. That’s double the market’s size in 2022. USD1 is the fifth largest stablecoin out there.

In November, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent raised his forecast for global stablecoin adoption to $3 trillion by 2030, lifting his previous $2 trillion estimate by roughly 50%.

Analysts at Citi are even more bullish, projecting the stablecoin market could expand to $4 trillion by the end of the decade.

Agent revolution?

World Liberty Financial’s agentic payments push signals an attempt to anchor USD1 at the centre of what industry pioneers increasingly describe as the next growth engine for digital dollars: machine-to-machine transactions.

While the analysts behind the highly circulated Citrini Research report warn that agentic payments could lead to the downfall of the world economy, industry champions are steaming ahead to make the tech a reality.

On a recent earnings call, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire framed stablecoins as the native currency of machine commerce.

“We’re building a new internet financial system,” he said, arguing that the real opportunity lies not in agents buying consumer goods, but in agents consuming services from one another.

Circle has rolled out new blockchain infrastructure and nanopayment capabilities designed to let agents hold balances and transact for fractions of a penny. Stripe, meanwhile, is developing Tempo, a purpose-built blockchain for stablecoin payments, alongside crypto partners.

E-commercy platform Shopify has integrated stablecoin payments with cashback incentives. Crypto exchange Coinbase incubated x402, an open standard aimed squarely at agentic payments. Venture funding is pouring into agent-driven platforms.

Yet adoption remains embryonic. x402 reports just tens of thousands of users and modest monthly volume against a global e-commerce market measured in trillions.

AI Momentum

Still, tech giants continue their relentless quest for AI platforms.

On Tuesday, Meta acquired Moltbook, a viral social network built specifically for AI agents, bringing its founders into the company’s Superintelligence Labs, Axios reported.

Moltbook created a verified registry for agents tethered to human owners, enabling them to coordinate and transact on behalf of users.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has hired the creator of OpenClaw, an autonomous agent framework.

The ecosystem is converging around identity, coordination and programmable payments — the rails required for software to act economically.

In this model, an AI legal agent charges another agent for research. A logistics agent pays a data provider for real-time shipping updates. An analytics bot purchases compute cycles by the minute. These flows are frequent, low-value and automated. They favour programmable money embedded directly into workflows.

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at [email protected].