Cathie Wood tells investors to track where AI agents spend money

Cathie Wood, CEO of ARK Invest, says investors tracking the next wave of technology adoption should watch not just what AI agents build, but where they spend money. The comment points to a fast-developing argument among crypto and asset-management executives over whether autonomous software payments flow through open blockchains or get locked inside a handful of banks and tech platforms.

• Cathie Wood told a panel at Robinhood’s Summit in Houston on Wednesday that investors should “follow the agents.”
• Joseph Chalom, co-CEO of SharpLink and former head of digital assets at BlackRock, argued AI agents’ financial system should not be controlled by “a handful of companies.”
• BlackRock’s September paper said AI agents could create new machine-to-machine demand for stablecoins and blockchain payment rails.

• $500 example spending cap Chalom cites for an agent booking a hotel
• $2,683.44 Ethereum’s price as cited in reporting on agentic payment rails

According to reporting by CoinDesk, Wood has long urged investors to “follow the developers” to spot where technology momentum builds. Her updated framing, offered near the close of a broader discussion on AI, private markets and technology investing, reflects a shift from AI systems that answer questions to AI agents that act and transact on a person’s behalf.

The distinction matters because agents that spend money need a payment infrastructure. That raises a question banks, payment companies and blockchain networks are each racing to answer.

Chalom warns against concentrated control of agent payments

Joseph Chalom, who now co-leads SharpLink after running digital assets at BlackRock, used the final installment of a three-part series on agentic finance to argue that control over AI agent payments should stay decentralized.

A world full of intelligent agents means nothing if a handful of companies decide where your money can go.

Joseph Chalom, co-CEO of SharpLink, in a post on X

Chalom’s framework centers on permissioned limits, not blanket access. A user might authorize an agent to spend up to $500 on a hotel booking while retaining the ability to revoke that authority and review a record of what the agent did.

He also wants agents to be portable across financial providers, carrying their identity, financial data and permissions from one company to another much as a phone number moves between carriers. In his view, open blockchains such as Ethereum, trading near $2,683.44 according to the report, could serve as a shared network so agents, apps and companies are not boxed into a single provider’s closed payment system.

BlackRock’s September paper ties agent demand to stablecoin use

BlackRock raised a similar point in a September paper examining the overlap between AI and digital assets, arguing that autonomous agents could generate new demand for payment systems built for machines rather than people. An agent might need to pay for an API call, buy data from another service, or rent computing power without waiting for human approval on each transaction.

Stablecoins, which move around the clock, and blockchain-based payment protocols that let software send small payments directly to other software, are one option BlackRock flagged for handling that kind of machine-to-machine spending. Coinbase’s x402 protocol is built specifically to let machines pay for online services such as data or API access, giving one concrete example of the infrastructure Chalom and BlackRock describe.

Signs of agent activity are already showing up elsewhere in crypto markets. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in a post on X that “Grok is the leading client for agentic traders on Coinbase currently,” though he did not provide figures or further detail on the volume involved.

Stripe, Visa and OpenAI compete for the same agent payment layer

Crypto rails will not have this space to themselves. Stripe, Visa, Google and OpenAI are each building their own methods for letting AI agents make purchases, and BlackRock’s paper noted that traditional payment systems will remain central to how agents transact.

That competition is what gives Wood’s “follow the agents” framing its edge for crypto investors specifically. Tracking which rails agents actually use could show whether stablecoins and blockchains gain real adoption, or whether most of that spending stays on conventional payment networks.

The BlockWest read. The open question here is not whether agents will spend money, but whose ledger records it. If Chalom’s portability model gains traction, custodians and banks lose a captive data stream on consumer and corporate spending the moment an agent can switch providers freely. Allocators watching stablecoin issuers and layer-1 transaction volume may find agent-driven flows a cleaner adoption signal than retail trading activity, since machine payments are harder to fake and easier to measure at scale.

Neither Stripe, Visa, Google nor OpenAI has published a competing framework addressing Chalom’s portability and permission concerns, leaving the contest over who controls agentic payment rails unresolved for now. Whether agents end up settling transactions on open blockchains or inside closed platform ecosystems remains the open question Wood’s investors will be watching next.

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