After the AI started voting on its own, USDC won in the end

Author: Clow

Original title: After AI votes by itself, only USDC is the winner

The market has been chasing AI coins for three years, but the one that is actually used by AI may not have been the answer for most people from the beginning.

What is most counterintuitive is that FET, TAO, and RENDER are coins with “AI” in their names. AI agents that actually run on the Internet don't use them at all.

AI agents that actually run on the Internet don't need FET to buy GPU computing power, don't use TAO to adjust the API, and don't pay royalties to the model without RENDER. An AI Agent can send hundreds of payments per second, and can't handle the 2.9% credit card plus a fixed processing fee of $0.3; the AI Agent requires sub-second settlement, and ACH wire transfers are still calculated in units of three days; if the AI Agent doesn't look at the screen and doesn't click a button, all tracks that require humans to click “confirm payment” simply fail.

Everything that claims to be an AI Token is completely absent in the real AI economy.

However, money still flows frantically between machines, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars every day. What's streaming?

Who is the AI Token?

It's not FET, not TAO, and it's not RENDER.

It's USDC.

A status code that had been hidden in the snow for 30 years suddenly woke up

In 2025, Coinbase teamed up with Circle and Google to do something very strange. They unearthed something that had been hidden in the snow for 30 years.

HTTP 402.

There are several status codes in the HTTP protocol that everyone sees every day: 200 is successful, 404 is not found, and 500 is a server explosion. However, the 402 number has been empty since the agreement was drafted in the 90s; the official name is Payment Required. The drafters reserved it back then, which means that in the future, the Internet will one day require a native payment mechanism.

As a result, no one has used it for a full 30 years. It wasn't until the 2025 x402 protocol came out that it was first activated.

The meaning is simple. The AI Agent accesses a paid API. In the past, the practice was to first register an account, get an API Key, bind a credit card, and confirm with a human point. It's no longer needed. The agent sent a request, and the server directly returned a 402 status code with payment metadata, clearly stating the amount, payment address, and acceptance chain. The agent's wallet saw 402, automatically signed a USDC transfer, sent a new request, and completed within two seconds.

No account, no API key, no human confirmation.

Jeremy Allaire gave a number: In the next three to five years, there will be “billions” of AI agents running on the internet and making payments 24 hours a day. This number sounds exaggerated, but if you accept the premise that machines work a few thousand times more often than humans, it immediately makes perfect sense.

A technical employee might sign 10 contracts a day, and an agent might sign 10 contracts a second.

After the x402 protocol was activated, the identity of USDC changed. It's no longer just a “stablecoin”; it's no longer something for coin traders to trade right. It has become the original protocol for the Internet of Machines, and is placed in the same place as TCP/IP and HTTP.

To put it bluntly, the Internet has changed from a network that “transmits information from person to person” to a network that “transfers value from machine to machine.” And the common currency used for this transfer is USDC.

98% of the answers have already been cast

Do you think this is just a story? The data has long since finished voting.

Circle's 2026 data: Over 98% of agent-driven payments chose USDC. It's not 60%, it's not 80%, it's 98%. The average payment of $0.31 is an amount that a human being would hardly initiate alone, because even Starbucks starts at $4 to buy a cup of coffee. This kind of 3-dime deal is probably just something going on between machines.

Circle created its own chain called Arc, specifically for stablecoin finance. The single cost on the Arc chain is not $0.00001, which was often quoted before, but about $0.01.

What can really push USDC transfers to the order of $0.00001 is not a single gas on the Arc chain, but rather aggregation under the chain and then unified settlement on the chain.

Compare that: 2.9% on a credit card plus 30 cents, and a bank wire between $15 and $50. The fixed fee portion of traditional payments is an order of magnitude higher than the total amount paid by the machine in a single transaction. To make a payment of $0.31 in a traditional banking system, an AI agent would pay close to 100 times its own cost for processing fees alone. It's not “friction,” it's “not doable.” However, the real problem solved by the stablecoin track is not to push every on-chain cost to infinity close to zero, but to make this kind of machine-level micropayment possible for the first time through programmable settlement and batch aggregation.

What are those actually called AI tokens?

Coins such as FET, TAO, and RENDER are almost invisible in AI Agent's wallet. They lie in speculators' contract accounts and fluctuate between 5% and 10% during the day. If an AI agent takes TAO to pay the computing power rental fee, it can pay 1000 hours today, maybe only 900 hours tomorrow, and 1100 hours the day after tomorrow. It has no way to make a budget, no way to make financial plans, and even less able to sign any contracts with external suppliers that have price anchors.

What's more ironic? Those coins bearing the name “AI” can't move a single penny in the real AI economy.

Their use is to fry humans, not machines.

Instead, a “stablecoin” has become the lifeblood of a machine civilization.

TAO is electricity, USDC is cash

Some people will say that FET and TAO aren't completely useless.

Yes, they have their scenes. However, this scenario was never a “currency”; it was a “commodity.”

HashKey gave a more accurate dichotomy in a Web3 report: AI tokens are the smallest semantic unit that consumes computational power, similar to electricity and gas; blockchain tokens are the smallest programmatic unit of value flow, which is cash.

Translate it. TAO is electricity flowing from an outlet in your home, and USDC is the cash in your wallet. You use TAO to train models, schedule computing power, and run reasoning, just like you use electricity to light a room and boil a kettle. But you won't use electricity to go to the supermarket to check out; you'll use cash.

AI agents may use TAO to coordinate computational tasks in their own internal networks. But as soon as it goes out, rents an AWS server, goes to Amazon to buy a plush toy, and pays a manuscript fee for a human outsourced writer, it only recognizes USDC. Because AWS doesn't charge TAO, Amazon doesn't charge FET, human workers don't get paid RENDER.

The two sides of the balance sheet are completely different things.

At the end of 2024, Stripe spent $1.1 billion to buy a stablecoin infrastructure company called Bridge. This number didn't attract much attention at the time, but looking back, it was a sign that traditional payment giants had surrendered to machine payments. A company that has relied on credit card fees for 20 years bought a ticket to the world of the machine economy for $1.1 billion.

VanEck then predicted that by 2027, AI Agent-driven automated on-chain transactions would reach $5 billion a day, with a compound annual growth rate of over 120%.

$5 billion a day is $1.8 trillion a year.

What is the concept of this number? Currently, the daily amount of global cross-border payments to SWIFT is around $5 trillion to $6 trillion. In other words, after three years, automatic transfers between AI agents will account for one-third of global cross-border payments.

And this 1.8 trillion will almost all go to USDC.

Summarize

The market mistold the AI Token story.

Real AI tokens are not FET, TAO, or RENDER; they are speculative tools that bet on the future growth of certain AI infrastructure. The real AI token is USDC, which is the settlement currency that AI agents use with real money every day.

One is a narrative, and the other is a water pipe. One tells stories for humans, and the other is for machines to run and produce.

How does the pendulum move? In 2022, everyone thought everything with an AI tag was valuable; in 2024, everything with an AI tag was a bubble; in 2026, it was discovered that the real winner was a “stablecoin.” Wall Street's pricing logic has always been slower than technical reality, and this time was no different.

The Internet has not killed the real economy; the real economy has learned e-commerce. Cryptocurrency did not disrupt the dollar; the dollar learned to go up the chain. The AI didn't create a new currency; the AI chose the oldest one, the dollar, and then used a programmatic version of it.

Does the “AI Token” you bought actually use AI?

Real AI tokens don't need the AI name.