The convergence of new onchain financial primitives and unlimited agent attention promises unprecedented value creation for consumers. The battle over control has begun.
Over $1 trillion of annual global financial services revenue is going to be up for grabs by 2030, growing to $4 trillion annually by 2035. Every major bank, broker, payments firm, and digital assets company is racing to capture a share in one of the most important battles over money and value we will see in our time.
This deserves more attention than it is getting.
It is being built on four elements that did not exist together until now, which I laid out in an OpEd titled "The agentic CFO in your pocket" in CoinDesk this past May. Stablecoins that work as always-on digital cash. Tokenized real-world assets that include funds, stocks, commodities and bonds. Decentralized finance (DeFi) as a programmable onchain finance layer where those assets are put to work. And AI agents as the automation layer to better manage every investor's financial life.
This convergence is the economic big bang. Each of these forces is powerful on its own. But bring them together, and finance stops operating as a collection of disconnected products. It becomes a new agentic financial universe that can explore, decide and act continuously, all on behalf of the investors. To quantify the impact of this coming transformation, my team built a model of the emerging agentic financial universe. It projects the growth of the global financial industry through 2035 and examines how ten major verticals could be reshaped by fee compression, new entrants, shifting market share and the migration of value to new agents and rails.
Our model focuses purely on agentic financial activity, which is the next stage of the AI revolution. It builds on the decade-long foundation of artificial intelligence related automation, which we estimate drives approximately 3 to 5 percent of financial industry user activity today. This article focuses on the future value that will be created by agents helping manage the financial industry for both institutions and retail investors.
The Attention Deficit Economy Meets Hyper Attentive Agents
Attention span is the underappreciated yet scarce commodity that drives many financial outcomes. We live in an attention-starved society, particularly when it comes to managing our financial lives. This void of attention is often filled with unsolicited advertisements, algorithmic recommendations, and most importantly omission, which cost retail investors hundreds of billions of dollars in value. Agents fundamentally change that equation.
This means agents will deliver significant value back to investors. It will make your financial providers compete to provide the lowest available fees for banking, transacting and borrowing. We estimate that they will collectively keep an extra $350 billion a year by 2030 from lower fees that agents compete away, estimated to rise to $1.4 trillion by 2035. Put another way, agents will eliminate nearly a quarter of all fees across the global financial industry by 2035.
Fee compression is only the starting point. The same agents will then make your money maximally productive.
Today, American households hold roughly $15 trillion in checking, savings and short-term deposits, much of it earning a fraction of prevailing money-market rates. This costs U.S. retail savers at least $180 billion a year in interest they never see. Money earning seven basis points in a checking account can earn 3 to 4 percent in a money market fund. A six month CD can mature and sweep back into an account paying almost nothing, where it remains until someone remembers to act. An agent does not forget. An agent has infinite attention and full financial literacy.
But an agent does not stop at finding a better savings rate. It understands what every dollar is meant to accomplish. It builds a portfolio around your short, medium and long term goals, monitors it continuously, rebalances as markets and your circumstances change, and harvests tax losses when opportunities appear. The agent will also pay attention to your liabilities. It will monitor your mortgage to determine when to prepay and when falling rates make refinancing worthwhile. It will also move credit card balances to reduce borrowing costs or maximize loyalty points.
Agents let every investor, regardless of account size, level up on this knowledge for the first time. And this matters more than people realize. Getting ahead financially means not only having access to better assets and opportunities. It requires knowing the right questions to ask and when to ask them.
These are not isolated optimizations. They are parts of a single financial life that no person has the time to watch, or understand, continuously. But agents change that. An agent does not sleep or get distracted. It has an unlimited attention span and remains focused on advancing the financial interests of the person it serves.
An Epic Battle to Capture the Flag
The battle over who owns the agents and the new value to be created and harvested has already started. The battlefield is crowded. It includes the likes of Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, PayPal, Circle, Tether, Robinhood, Coinbase, Binance, and many others. The largest financial institutions in the world, such as JPMorgan, Citigroup, BlackRock, BNY, State Street, and other incumbents are watching closely and plotting their strategies for this new financial order. Every one of them is seeking to capture the same flag, which is to own the space where trillions of agents will transact on behalf of billions of global customers.
The stakes appear similar to every technology revolution before this one. But the magnitude is on an entirely different scale, because this is a battle over the future of money. Whoever owns the infrastructure, owns the agent, and therefore the customer. The winner collects a fee on every transaction, sees every decision an agent makes, and decides which products the agent may recommend and which fund your idle cash could get swept into.
Onchain Primitives and Open Rails Will Unlock Massive Value
For an agent to make your assets as productive as possible, it needs new always-on financial tools. These come through stablecoins, tokenized real world assets and DeFi execution venues is sharing a set of programmable and always-on set of blockchain rails. The agent needs to see ownership, prices, collateral requirements and lending opportunities in the same environment. It must be able to move stablecoins, pledge a tokenized asset, borrow against it and settle the transaction without waiting for several intermediaries to reconcile separate ledgers. Companies like Aave and Morpho are building the infrastructure and application layer for this type of onchain borrowing and lending with agentic capabilities.
These onchain primitives give tokenized assets superpowers. A tokenized stock will no longer sit idle in a brokerage account. It will be lent to generate additional income or used as collateral for a short term loan, allowing the investor to access liquidity without selling. Tokenized bonds and funds become productive collateral as well. Stablecoins can move into lending markets when demand is high, then return to cash when the investor needs liquidity. An agent can monitor the rates, risks and tax consequences across these markets and decide when an asset should be held, lent, borrowed against or moved.
We are in the earliest innings of all of this moving onchain, but the standards for this new financial universe are being formed quickly. Coinbase wrote a machine-to-machine stablecoin micropayments standard called x402 and open sourced it. Hundreds of millions of agent-to-agent stablecoin payments have already settled through onchain networks, including Base, Coinbase's Ethereum-based network, and Solana. Ethereum’s trustless agent registry protocol, ERC-8004, establishes a verifiable identity framework that enables agents from different organizations to transact without prior bilateral trust. This enables open agent economies governed by common rules rather than by a single platform operator. Over 10,000 agents registered within ten weeks to use it.
These agentic transactions will predominantly happen where the stablecoins, tokenized assets, and DeFi liquidity are concentrated, the majority of which within the Ethereum ecosystem. Ethereum set a mainnet record of 3.6 million transactions in a single day in April 2026 and routinely cleared more than 2 million a day through the summer, and the network has over 200 million onchain addresses with a positive balance.
What Comes Next
In the coming days, I will share additional articles that explore the forces shaping this new paradigm and the stakes for both consumers and industry competitors.
One will map the battle between incumbents and challengers across the agentic financial economy, assessing who is poised to come out on top. Another will examine the principles and guardrails necessary for this agentic financial revolution to succeed on an open and equitable basis.
