As financial institutions invest money in and explore uses for agentic finance – the use of AI systems that can act autonomously to make finance decisions and perform financial tasks – stablecoins will be an important part of its growth story, Circle co-founder Sean Neville said.

“Stablecoins are effectively AI-native money. If an AI actor is making a payment, it doesn't make a lot of sense for it to have a physical credit card – it makes a lot of sense for it to have money that moves at internet speed,” Neville said Oct. 27 at the Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas. “It’s helpful that they also pass borders nearly instantly, at very low fees.”

Neville co-founded Circle, the now-public blockchain payments company, in 2013 with Circle’s now-CEO Jeremy Allaire. Together with others, they developed USDC, Circle’s native stablecoin, which global equity research and brokerage firm Bernstein recently said would capture one third of the stablecoin market by 2027.

Now, Neville’s sights are turned to his new project, Catena Labs, billed as an AI-native bank. AI actors will dominate financial transactions in the next few years, he said, and while the dollar is going internet-native, the internet is going “agent-native.”

At Catena, “we think our customers for this new kind of bank will be AI actors,” he said. “As science fiction as that sounds, in the future, if an AI actor is making payments, well, it needs to get paid, needs to be able to manage assets effectively, needs to handle effects, needs to negotiate, may want to get yields on the holdings that it has.”

“What kind of financial operating system is necessary to enable an AI actor to do that? We're building it,” he said.

Money20/20 is owned by Informa, Banking Dive’s parent company.