The Aptos Foundation and Aptos Labs have committed $50 million to the development of Aptos, with a particular focus on AI agent infrastructure and research, including support for two products shipped last year to meet the growing demand for onchain AI agent activity.
These products include Decibel, an AI-powered onchain order book and perpetual exchange that launched on the Aptos mainnet in February, and Shelby, a decentralized data storage protocol designed to power AI agent workloads, Aptos Foundation he said on Thursday.
“Autonomous agents are already transacting across the network at frequencies that no human can match, heading to whatever location is fastest, most consistent and least gameable,” it said.
Aptos joins a growing number of cryptographic protocols seeking opportunities to support the AI agent economy. Aptos said there is a need to build infrastructure that delivers sub-second finality and systems that “run 24/7, with no human intervention to escalate to.”
AI agents can act as personal assistants to people, both at home and in the workplace, performing everyday tasks on their behalf, whether it’s booking a flight, making a purchase, or completing high-level transactions online.
Aptos full stack ecosystem plan for markets and machines. Aptos Network
Last month, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong predicted that “soon there will be more AI agents transacting online than humans,” echoing Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire’s January remarks that “literally billions of AI agents” will be transacting online within three to five years.
The World Economic Forum also expects a boom predicted in January that artificial intelligence agents could become a $236 billion market by 2034, a 43-fold enhance from a market size of $5.4 billion in 2024.
AI agents utilize blue chip stablecoins to conduct transactions
On Wednesday, Amazon Web Services said it has integrated Coinbase’s x402 payment protocol with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to enable AI agents to make USDC (USDC) payments and access services through payment control managed by AWS.
A week earlier, cryptocurrency wallet startup Oobit launched a Visa-backed virtual card for AI agents who can make online purchases in USDT (USDT) on behalf of companies.
The foundation said the Aptos token (APT) will play a key role in the ecosystem’s AI agent economy as it will be burned in transactions, required to access advanced AI agent features, and staked to improve performance.
Related: How AI agents can change arbitrage in prediction markets
The foundation said the $50 million will also be used to develop other aspects of the “Aptos stack,” which also includes integrations with neobanks, institutional platforms and wallet providers.
Aptos said it also plans to work on creating encrypted memories and offering confidential perpetrator trading, among other things.
Last month, Aptos launched a privacy-focused coin
Meanwhile, Aptos launched a privacy-focused coin – Confidential APT – on the Aptos mainnet on April 24 as part of an effort to rectify the long-standing trade-off between protecting user privacy and maintaining transparency to ensure compliance.
Aptos Labs founding engineer Sherry Xiao told Cointelegraph that Confidential APT can assist companies hide the salaries of employees receiving on-chain pay, as well as hide treasury movements, settlement flows and trading strategies that competitors could otherwise see.
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