CZ: AI and Crypto Integration Will Start with Stablecoins, AI Trading Takes Priority Over AI Payments

On August 27, founder CZ stated at the Bitcoin Asia 2026 conference:

"I believe that (the integration of AI and crypto) may start with stablecoins. Once you can accept stablecoins, it becomes very easy to add Bitcoin. Then hopefully it will be just as easy to add BNB, Ethereum, Solana, and other blockchains. Moreover, some large AI companies may also want to issue their own tokens, so they are likely to integrate these.

I have discussed with several top AI companies about how to issue tokens, and there are many different ideas. You are all still in the early stages. For example, building data centers requires a lot of funding; a 1-gigawatt computing power can cost between $30 billion to $50 billion. Many AI companies, although highly valued, are running out of funds, and many do not have enough money to build that scale of computing power. Some AI companies I have talked to want to build hundreds of gigawatts of computing power in the coming years, which will cost trillions of dollars, right? So we will discuss how it might be possible to issue a data center token that allows holders to earn rewards from using that data center in the future.

If you want to issue a token, you want to maximize its utility, so naturally, you want to allow payments for subscription services with the token, and you also want to bind it with different language models and different services. Therefore, there are many different models that can be combined. Thus, it is not unimaginable for AI companies to issue their own utility tokens and promote them. I think we have already seen some closely related companies issuing tokens, such as Worldcoin. Although it may not have much utility today, those people are very close to AI companies.

So I believe crypto will play a role. When AI handles payments for us, they will use cryptocurrencies. But today, I think AI payments may emerge only after AI trading. For example, using AI agents to book hotels, pay bills, etc. Based on my conversations with some top AI companies, payments are not their priority today. They are trying to make the agents smarter to help you find the best deals, but they do not think payments are a big problem that AI needs to solve today. After AI helps people find the best hotels, most people can book with their credit cards themselves.

But in the trading field, AI may be more suitable because you need to gather a lot of information very quickly, react quickly to news, and analyze charts. No matter how you trade, AI can probably increase efficiency tenfold to facilitate this process. And to do this, you wouldn’t want AI to just help you analyze and then you press the button to trade yourself. For efficiency or timing reasons, you would want AI to place orders directly for you. So AI may first help you trade, and then help you pay."