Stablecoins x Agents: The New Financial Stack

On July 7 2026, The Big Whale organised a Corporate Breakfast in Paris, hosted by J.P. Morgan at Place Vendôme alongside the RAISE Summit, to explore how stablecoins and agentic AI are converging to reshape the payments stack and, beyond it, the entire financial value chain.

Speakers

Payments at the Core: Stablecoins, AI, and the Battle for Financial Flows

• Manuel Costescu, MD Global Fintech Champion at J.P. Morgan
• Thibault Pelé, Head of Product Emerging Technologies at Worldline
• Océane Codjia, Head of EMEA Stablecoin Payments at Coinbase
• Maxime Coniglio, The Big Whale (moderator)

The intercompany treasury use case is live, at scale, and it works

The debate about stablecoin utility is largely over for corporates with cross-border treasury flows. Océane Codjia gave the clearest live example of the morning: a large payment provider moving several hundred million dollars a day between an EU entity and a US entity — multiple times daily. Traditional rails: 24 to 48 hours, constrained by banking hours and cut-off times. The new setup, live in production:

• Each entity opens a treasury account with Coinbase
• Fiat is deposited and minted into stablecoins instantly
• Stablecoins transfer between wallets on-chain in minutes
• The receiving entity converts back to fiat

The gain is not marginal. It eliminates settlement lag on a flow that never stops. Manuel Costescu framed the category correctly: stablecoins are a platform, not a destination. The value is in what they enable — intraday liquidity, competitive yield on idle balances, and settlement infrastructure that runs 24/7.

Europe's adoption gap is an off-ramp problem, not a conviction problem

Worldline operates across both European and APAC markets, which puts Thibault Pelé in a position to make the contrast precisely. In APAC — particularly in travel and multi-subsidiary corporates — stablecoins are becoming systemic. Merchants there use them to pay suppliers, so holding stablecoins in treasury makes sense: there is no need to off-ramp, the stablecoin circulates within the ecosystem.

In Europe, the question that consistently comes back is: "okay, but then what do I do with the stablecoin?"

• If the only exit is an off-ramp, on-ramp and off-ramp costs combined erode the advantage
• European corporate clients are not yet innovative enough to hold stablecoins for the sake of experimentation
• The right approach for adoption: link stablecoins to existing payment products rather than presenting them as a standalone treasury instrument
• B2B payments is where European corporates find genuine use — but the stablecoin needs to be embedded in the workflow, not dropped in as an isolated tool

Thibault Pelé's framing was direct: the European infrastructure already has TIPS, running at 0.02 cents per transaction. For domestic instant payments, stablecoins offer no advantage. The use case is cross-border, cross-entity, and off-hours — and that requires education before adoption.

Stablecoins and AI agents converge at the infrastructure level

The technical case for why the two technologies merge naturally came from Thibault Pelé. Both rely on the same underlying primitive: cryptographic identity. An agentic payment system requires two things that blockchain already provides natively:

• A mandate — a cryptographically signed contract between the consumer and the agent, verifiable by the merchant without a central system
• Agent identity — "know your agent," a verifiable proof that the agent is legitimately acting on the consumer's behalf

Both of these can be anchored on-chain as self-sovereign identity. The settlement layer is the stablecoin. The execution layer is a smart contract. Zero-knowledge proofs ensure no confidential information is exposed during the transaction.

Coinbase is already building on this: the x402 protocol allows agents to make micropayments to access data via API — an agent queries a research source, pays in stablecoins on-chain, receives access in seconds. Coinbase for Agents extends this to consumer accounts, allowing a connected agent to trade and pay directly on the user's behalf.

The data on current scale is honest: in Q1 2026, roughly 30,000 agents processed approximately $2M in payments on Base. The infrastructure is real; the volume is not yet.

Money now has a roadmap: stablecoins are a differentiated product

The most structurally significant point of the morning came from Thibault Pelé: for the first time in financial history, money is becoming a differentiated product. Commercial bank money has no roadmap. Stablecoins have product managers, product marketing managers, feature releases.

Two examples from the current market:

• Circle's CPN (Circle Payment Network): a set of developer interfaces for building use cases on top of USDC — effectively positioning the stablecoin as an operating system layer for payments
• Société Générale's EURCV: targeted at the settlement of tokenized assets, designed for institutional European use — a stablecoin with a specific domain and a sovereign logic behind it

The implication for corporates choosing which stablecoin to hold is not just liquidity and compliance. It is feature set and issuer intent. Océane Codjia gave the live example: a tokenized money-market fund integrated with Coinbase infrastructure allows any fintech or trader to invest using USDC directly, without waiting for a redemption to clear through a chain of emails and banking days. Idle capital generates yield in real time.

Non-human-present transactions: the real unlock Europe cannot use yet

The most commercially transformative use case for agentic payments is the "non-human-present" transaction: an agent executes a purchase — say, buying shoes when the price drops below a threshold — days after the consumer set the instruction, without the consumer present to authenticate. This is where smart contracts, stablecoins and agents become genuinely new infrastructure rather than faster versions of existing processes.

The problem for Europe: PSD2 does not allow non-human-present transactions. PSD3, in its current form, does not either.

• The US is running with Google's AP2 and card-scheme agentic protocols already
• Europe has the regulatory framework for stablecoins (MiCA) but not for the transaction type that would unlock the highest-value agent use cases
• Thibault Pelé's five-year forecast: stablecoins will be part of European corporate treasury, but not exclusively; agentic payments at scale in Europe is a question mark, conditional on regulatory change

Océane Codjia's closing advice for anyone in the room who wants to build understanding before taking it to their board: open a wallet, put some USDC in it, do a few transfers. Build the personal comprehension before the institutional case.

Conclusion

Paris confirmed that the stablecoin debate has moved from legitimacy to deployment. The live use cases are real, the on-ramp problem is structural but solvable, and the convergence with agentic AI is technically coherent rather than just narrative. What Europe still lacks is the regulatory framework for the transaction type — non-human-present — that would make agents genuinely autonomous. Until PSD3 or its successor addresses that, the most disruptive use cases will develop in the US first and migrate to Europe after. The question for European corporates and financial institutions is not whether to engage, but whether to wait for that migration or to start building the understanding now.