CZ Says AI Agents Could Drive Crypto’s Next Adoption Wave

CZ believes AI-powered trading and payments could arrive within months rather than years, with crypto as the default rail.

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, known in crypto circles as CZ, has said that AI agents could become one of the industry’s biggest adoption drivers.

That, according to him, is because the autonomous software will likely rely on blockchain-based payments long before traditional financial systems adapt to their needs.

CZ Says AI and Crypto Are Natural Partners

CZ made the comments in a wide-ranging interview with Galaxy Research’s Alex Thorn, and his argument was fairly mechanical. He said that today, AI can find you the cheapest flight, but it can’t actually buy the ticket. This is because payment methods like cards need humans to swipe them, or at least authenticate them, and the moment two-factor authentication or KYC document checks show up, AI agents hit a wall they can’t get past.

Blockchain, by contrast, is built on APIs from the ground up, which means an autonomous system can interact with it in the same way it interacts with any other piece of software.

“Agentic trading and payments will come in a matter of months, not years, I think. And they will use crypto,” Zhao told Thorn.

He framed it as less of a prediction and more of an inevitability given how the infrastructure is built, with an AI agent that needs to transact on someone’s behalf having to plug into something programmable, and most of the legacy financial system isn’t.

CZ also pushed back on the idea that AI is pulling capital and attention away from crypto, pointing out that people are already trading AI-related stocks using crypto rails, meaning, in his telling, that the AI hype is actually adding to trading volumes on blockchains rather than competing with it.

“Even the money that went there still flows on the blockchain,” he said.

Essentially, his point was that blockchain, AI, and the internet are three separate technologies that will all keep expanding side by side rather than cannibalizing each other, the same way the internet didn’t disappear when blockchain showed up.

You may also like:

The ex-CEO also tied that back to financial inclusion, telling Thorn that with billions of adults still outside the traditional banking system, permissionless payment infrastructure could open up participation in ways legacy banking rails haven’t managed to.

AI Adoption Comes With Both Opportunities and Risks

Zhao’s view isn’t exactly new. Venture capital firm a16z crypto made the same point in a December 2025 report, arguing that AI agents will require payment systems capable of moving value at internet speed. At the time, it suggested that stablecoins and blockchain networks could become the preferred settlement layer for machine-to-machine transactions.

But early experiments at integrating these agents haven’t been without incident. For example, in April, a company called PocketOS lost its entire production database after an AI coding agent deleted it, along with all backups, in one API call. Elsewhere, another AI agent known as Lobstar Wilde accidentally sent $450,000 worth of tokens to somebody who had begged for 4 SOL, apparently to fund a relative’s tetanus treatment.