13th February 2026 > > A.I. agents & cryptos.
- 11 minutes ago
- 4 min read
tl;dr
A.I. agents and cryptos – now this is getting exciting.
Market Snap
Market Wrap
Open interest for perpetual futures continues to decline, which is very pleasing. The concept of perpetual futures has been around for decades but had not found a use case until the advent of cryptos. It will be a glorious day when the whole perpetual futures business withers and dies leaving behind just a few sharks feeding off each other.
Occasional Series – Interregnum
A Sri Lankan safari beckons. See you on the other side.
Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – A.I. just got a whole lot more interesting
A.I. started out as a better search engine, that was its first use case. For me at least. As the model got bigger and better, I started to learn how to use A.I. to help my research, to fact check because – incredible as this may sound – sometimes I do get it wrong. Grammar and spelling too, for the very remote chance that the CCC might just possibly make a mistake on that front.
I would never use A.I. to write for me as the CCC has its own, authentic voice, whether you like it or not, whether you agree with us or not, for that is our team style, and no-one is going to change that. Read it or not, it’s up to you.
If you are interested, the draft of the previous CCC received this response from Lady Lex prior to publication:
At least someone is on my side.
…
A few months ago, I signed up to a free A.I. course which promised to teach anyone how to properly use the tools that were rapidly becoming available.
An online zoom type course, it was spread over a Saturday and a Sunday, eight hours each day. With Saturday afternoons often based around watching Watford play, and Saturday nights for having a laugh, and Sundays for cooking roasts, there was literally no chance of me getting involved in any significant way. But the first couple of hours on that Saturday morning before getting on the 73 bus to Euston to then train it to Vicarage Road – boy, did I learn a lot. I admit I have felt regretful ever since about not staying the course.
The whole A.I. paradigm has moved on so fast since even then.
…
Stock prices for some tech companies took a double-edged battering recently from two incompatible fears. The first has been talked about a lot over the last twelve months – the fear that A.I. is overhyped, that we are in a A.I. driven valuation bubble, and that many hundreds of billions of dollars of investors’ money are being wasted chasing a technology that will never live up to expectations. For the record, that is not my assessment, far from it, but it is a legitimate concern.
The second fear is that with the release of the latest Claude – whose code was written by the previous iteration of Claude, a truly extraordinary yet terrifying piece of information – many white-collar, professional jobs are about to become redundant, replaced by the machines. For the record, that is what is very likely to happen starting this year.
Like I say, two incompatible fears, but no-one could ever claim markets are rational, unless you subscribe to the snake-oil theory of technical analysis, alongside your deep and meaningful belief in fairies, dragons, and witches’ spells. Oh, and faked moon landings too.
What we are witnessing in the latest iterations of A.I. highlights the emergence of agents which will happen at scale and at ever increasing acceleration of integration during 2026. The Open A.I. browser comes fully loaded with its own agent which can be automated to complete quite complex tasks. The agent can do your online shopping for you, make restaurant reservations, manage your diary, and so on. It will soon be commonplace that administrative tasks like these are handled by agents and not people themselves pointing the way forward for potentially huge productivity gains for those countries that have shown themselves willing to embrace new technology over the last decade (that counts the UK out for starters).
Even more thrillingly, this is the opportunity for the crypto revolution to properly assert itself, a topic we have discussed before:
…
We have taken the first steps into this paradigm shift with the launch of Coinbase Agentic Wallets:
I will let the press release explain the concept:
“AgentKit represents a significant step forward in the integration of artificial intelligence with blockchain technology. This model-agnostic tool allows developers to build AI agents that can perform a wide range of onchain operations — from basic transactions to complex smart contract interactions.
Whether you're looking to deploy tokens, execute transfers, or perform token swaps, AgentKit provides the essential building blocks for autonomous blockchain interactions.”
We already know that the stablecoin revolution is going to replace the current outdated fiat settlement system because of its superiority in two key respects – instantaneous settlement at near-zero cost, hence increasing productivity by lowering the cost of capital for all business making us all wealthier, all other things being equal. If you are not convinced, surely TradFi’s startling public admission of the superiority of stablecoins over fiat (https://www.curiouscryptos.com/post/12th-february-2026-the-ft-again-the-clarity-act) gives the game away.
Agentic A.I. with access to your online hot wallet (with limited funds, natch) is going to allow us all much greater time and freedom but this is merely a stepping stone to truly autonomous A.I. agents which will “… sell their services in exchange for cryptos in the form of USD stablecoins, to buy the processing power they need to function. Darwin’s survival of the fittest will be played out in real time in front of our very own eyes, which should prove highly entertaining.” (Quote from the CCC dated 25th September 2025).
Already, new tools are being built on top of these developments at lightning speed:
2026 is the year when the world changes in more dramatic fashion than ever before, courtesy of the heavenly match of A.I. with the crypto revolution. What exciting times we live in (but don’t tell the FT that).
Comments