Key Takeaways:
Meta Platforms Inc. is betting that agentic commerce — AI agents negotiating and settling transactions autonomously — will become its next major revenue driver, with stablecoins serving as the assumed payment rail inside the company's vision.
In a wide-ranging interview on CoinDesk Spotlight, Chief Data Officer Alex Schultz said Meta already has more than 1 million weekly active businesses using its AI agents, up from "basically nothing at the start of the year." The company is building business agents for all businesses, he said, with the goal of handling everything from birthday party logistics to cross-border supply chain negotiations on WhatsApp.
"We think it might be the next tier of business for our entire company," Schultz said.
The payments layer inside that vision is stablecoins. Schultz described physical wallets as obsolete, predicting a future of purely digital payments modeled on Asia's conversational commerce leaders. He pointed to WeChat's red envelope system and Line's commerce infrastructure in Japan, Thailand and Taiwan as proof that the model works at scale.
"Stablecoins are a big part of the solution," Schultz said.
The interview fell on the seventh anniversary of Facebook's Libra announcement — a project that triggered a global regulatory backlash and was eventually abandoned in 2022 after being rebranded as Diem. Schultz acknowledged the history with a dry aside: "Maybe we said some stuff that annoyed some governments."
But the regulatory environment has shifted dramatically since then. With stablecoin legislation now in place and the Securities and Exchange Commission taking a more accommodating stance, Meta is pursuing a less controversial strategy: integrating regulated third-party stablecoins rather than issuing its own. Schultz framed Meta's role as the interface layer — the messaging and commerce surface — while payment settlement moves underneath it through partners.
"The history of the company is that we tend to be a partnership company on these things," he said.
The Verification Problem
Schultz's most candid remarks came on the topic of decentralized identity. For agentic commerce to function, buyers and sellers need to trust that an AI agent represents the business it claims to represent.
"Decentralization, especially if we can take verification outside of our system — my God, it would be useful for us," Schultz said. "It would just be incredible if there was a decentralized service that we could just plug into."
He said Meta has not adopted any decentralized identity system because none has reached the scale, reliability or mainstream penetration to warrant full integration. "Really smart people have tried, and it's not there yet."
The demand, however, is clear. Schultz wrote in a post on the agentic economy that "for you to transact with an agent, you need to know it represents the business it says it represents." That verification layer remains the core infrastructure gap for the agentic economy to scale.
What This Means for the Stablecoin Market
Meta's embrace of stablecoins as the default settlement layer for agentic commerce represents a potential step-change in adoption. The company's platforms — WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram — reach billions of users globally. In Brazil and India alone, Schultz said Meta already has more than 1 million small businesses doing commerce through conversations on WhatsApp.
The move aligns with broader industry trends. Hyundai this month became the first major South Korean company to use stablecoins for live cross-border treasury transfers, moving $20,000 from its U.S. unit to its Mexico unit via Tether's USDT on Avalanche in about seven minutes, compared with three to four hours through traditional banking. A second pilot with Circle's USDC and Visa is planned for Europe.
Meanwhile, a coalition of 27 crypto and Web3 firms including OKX, MetaMask and Matter Labs this week launched the Internet Court, a protocol designed to handle contractual disputes between autonomous AI agents — the enforcement layer that agentic commerce will require as transaction volumes grow.
For Meta, the pieces are coming together. Schultz said the company views agentic payments, decentralized identity and stablecoin rails not as distant possibilities but as operational realities. Whether the infrastructure outside Meta — decentralized verification, interoperable dispute resolution, and regulatory clarity across jurisdictions — catches up to the company's timeline will determine how quickly the vision scales.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
