AI agents are starting to hold wallets and pay for things, and finance has no standard way to tell one agent from another. Solowin Holdings signed a memorandum in April with SC Ventures, Standard Chartered’s venture arm, to incubate an AI payments project called AGENPAY. The Hong Kong firm, listed on Nasdaq under AXG, sells the piece underneath it as Know-Your-Agent, a compliance engine that gives a machine counterparty a verifiable identity.
Is an agent gonna be able to open a bank account?
“Is an agent gonna be able to open a bank account? Is JP Morgan gonna open an account for an agent?” Yat Siu, executive chairman of Animoca Brands, said on the On The Margin podcast. “Probably not gonna happen, right? So how do they do that? They have a wallet. We actually think you know agents with wallets essentially become autonomous economic actors who then basically do not just trade but buy and do stuff. They can use a stablecoin, right? We already have agents that are trading on hyperliquid. I have two hundred and eighty agents now doing all sorts of stuff.”
Siu puts the eventual population at “anywhere from 50 to 100 billion agents minimum.” He expects the money to follow. “The total advertising, online advertising revenues is around $900 billion a year,” he said. “That’s all gonna shift into a kind of transactional invocation economy powered by agents.”
“The next step, which is already starting, is that the AI agents start transacting on your behalf. So they pay for things, they sign up for services, they probably handle your financial transactions now,” Varun Kabra, chief growth officer at Concordium, said on On The Margin. “The counterparty on the other side, the airline in this case, or the ticketing platform, whatever it is, they have no way to verify whether a real accountable human is behind the transaction. And that could open a door to fraud, bots acting as humans, agents operating with no accountability.”
“You’re quickly gonna realize because our entire financial ecosystem was primarily human-centric,” Chandler Fung, co-founder of t54 Labs, said on in an interview. “The entire society is a trust business.”
Most banks still block agents from customer money, and Solowin spent 2026 building for that gap.
“AI doesn’t have a transaction layer right now,” Atul Khekade, co-founder of XDC Network, said in an interview. “AI platforms don’t have a monetization compliance layer that they can use for, like, real transactions to execute actions. insurance companies, banks, fintech providers, airline companies, a lot of them are coming to us now.”
Thomas Zhu, a Solowin director and co-founder of its AlloyX subsidiary, spent 2015 to 2020 as an executive director in Goldman Sachs’ securities division. He then ran digital assets at China Asset Management (Hong Kong), which listed among Asia’s first spot bitcoin and ether ETFs in 2024.
“Without compliant governance, AI-stablecoin integration will remain experimental,” Zhu said in written answers to questions.
The rails underneath
Solowin’s Bahrain subsidiary was licensed by that country’s central bank in June to issue stablecoins, the first granted under that framework. The coin itself is still to come.
“Agents are like fundamentally about outsourcing a purchase and anyone who has ever outsourced a purchase knows that this comes with trade-offs,” Nitya Subramanian, chief executive of the wallet infrastructure firm Para, said on On The Margin. “Wallets are ultimately the authorization and control flow layer of anything that’s happening on chain. Every chain, every DeFi primitive, every action that you can take on chain needs to go through a wallet. And I feel like people still don’t fully get that.”
“I could create a stable coin backed card and give it $200 a week and just have it buy Chipotle,” Subramanian said of the limits she would set. “So it’s only allowed to buy my Chipotle bowl every day.”
“I think in the past 12 months, there’s been over 300 million unique users of stablecoins, which is an absurdly high number,” Patrick Kim, a researcher at the crypto data firm Artemis, said on On The Margin, of the settlement asset banks spent 2026 chasing. “If you told this to someone five years ago, they would look you dead in the eyes and say, you’re bullshitting me, like you’re bluffing.”
Supply was $308 billion on Aug. 13, according to Reap’s 2026 stablecoin data, and every major bank is now expected to launch one.
What the agents will trade
“Reality is the world that we’ve been living in for crypto for the past few years has been a lot of these, you know, quote unquote unsexy use cases, right? Like bringing private credit on chain, bringing equities on chain,” Kim said.
Zhu wants agents trading exactly those, starting with government bonds and money-market funds and moving to real estate and private credit, sold to banks as a service rather than built in-house. Solowin runs a tokenization platform called Ferion and backed a funding round for Libeara in April, a Singapore platform SC Ventures also supports.
“You own the token and the token is the asset, you own the asset. It’s different. It’s what we call title tokenization,” Chris Turner, co-founder of the impact investment platform Kula, said on in an interview, of the distinction underneath the $80 billion tokenization push. Most of the market does something weaker, he said: “it’s giving a contractual exposure to the economic upside of that particular asset. But you don’t own the asset.”
The binding constraints, Zhu said, are “cross-jurisdictional legal affirmation, custody and regulatory compliance.”
Where the business stands
Revenue for the year to March 31 was $28.05 million, up 895%, according to its 6-K, of which $22.2 million came from AI infrastructure fees. The company is spending ahead of that, with $40.14 million of operating expenses and a $13.29 million net loss, and it bought AlloyX for $350 million in stock to reach the UAE, ASEAN and Africa.
“The last time we had a new financial rail was probably credit cards in the 70s,” Subramanian said. “And so it’s probably the most exciting time in many of our, if not most of our careers to be building in either FinTech or crypto.”
“if you refuse to access it, if you say I don’t want anything to do with it, that’s no different than saying I don’t want to be on the internet,” Siu said.
