The next stage of the digital economy may not be driven by humans, but by autonomous agents acting on their behalf, according to Chi Zhang, founder and CEO of Kite , an Avalanche layer 1.
Zhang believes this marks the beginning of a new financial era — one where AI systems communicate and pay each other without human intervention.
"So Kite is building what [we] call the first AI payment blockchain," Zhang told interviewer Alp Gasimov. "That is essentially what we are moving towards right now — the future of agent and internet, which is there are going to be tens of trillions of agents running on the internet on behalf of humans, on behalf of users and businesses to do stuff."
These "agents," Zhang said, will need an infrastructure that allows them to identify themselves, access services and make payments autonomously — something traditional financial rails weren't designed to support.
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"To access the agentic services and use those products … they need to make payments, which means they need to identify themselves, they need to access those services and then pay for those services," Zhang explained. "That is exactly what Kite is doing — agentic identity and payments."
"Agents, identity and payments" in practice
When asked to break down what that means in practical terms, Zhang pointed to how AI-driven commerceis already taking shape.
"Now you can just stay on ChatGPT and you can buy shoes, buy groceries, whatever things on Shopify now," she said. "You don't need to leave the ChatGPT interface and everything will be taken care of for you."
He illustrated the concept with a personal example:
"Next week will be my wife's birthday… please find the best gift based on her past preference and my budget is $2,000. Then ChatGPT will find the best gift list and say, okay, this is three of them. As a user, you say, please purchase that. The agent — ChatGPT — will go out to actually shop and pay for that service for you."
Crucially, the payment occurs without the user entering any credit card details, highlighting a future in which AI agents transact seamlessly on-chain.
"You don't need to do anything there," Zhang said. "They will do it automatically for you."
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Kite is building a foundation for this next phase of digital commerce. In the future, software agents will make purchases, transfer funds, and negotiate agreements on behalf of humans . Each will carry a verifiable identity and its own digital wallet, capable of operating according to rules set by the user.
This story was originally reported by TheStreet on Nov 3, 2025, where it first appeared in the Innovation section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
