Bernstein Backs Circle and Coinbase as Top Stablecoin Plays, With AI Payments as a Wildcard
Bernstein backs Circle and Coinbase as the top stablecoin plays, pointing to record USDC volumes and early agentic payment infrastructure as reasons to pay attention.
Quick Insights
- Bernstein says Circle and Coinbase are still the cleanest ways to track stablecoin growth, driven largely by their shared exposure to USD Coin (USDC).
- Machine-driven payments are emerging as a possible long-term use case, but activity remains limited. Coinbase's x402 has processed under $25 million in the past month, while Stripe's early tests saw just $5,000 in its first week.
Coinbase's x402 protocol has processed about $25 million in the past month. Stripe's Machine Payments Protocol, launched on its Tempo blockchain last week, clocked $5,000 in its first seven days. Those are not numbers that move markets. But Bernstein reckons the story they hint at is worth watching, and the firm is pointing to Circle and Coinbase as the two clearest ways to trade it.
Analyst Gautam Chhugani put out a note on Monday arguing that agentic payments could end up being a real tailwind for stablecoins. If you haven't come across the term, agentic payments are transactions where software pays other software with zero human involvement. Picture an AI assistant that needs computing power or access to a paid dataset halfway through a task. Instead of flagging a human to punch in card details, it just pays, instantly, using stablecoins. Chhugani wasn't overselling it. He framed this as a bonus on top of a business that's already working well, not the reason to buy in.
USDC's record run
The stuff already happening with USDC is arguably more interesting. Supply has pushed past $79 billion, a record, and USDC has overtaken Tether on transaction volumes for the first time since 2019, now accounting for about 64% of adjusted volume this year. Tether is still bigger by market cap, so the fact that USDC is moving more money tells you something. People aren't just sitting on it. They're spending it. More fintech companies are building natively on stablecoin rails, and the bread-and-butter use cases, cross-border business payments and remittances, keep growing.
Bernstein's broader take is that stablecoins are decoupling from crypto. Bitcoin gets pulled around by rate expectations and ETF flows. Stablecoins are developing their own growth story, one rooted in actual payment demand rather than speculation. That distinction matters because it changes how you think about the risk profile entirely.
How the protocols work
On the agentic side, Coinbase's x402 builds payments into the infrastructure of the web. Any online service can charge for access the moment it's used, and AI agents can settle up automatically in stablecoins. No accounts, no subscriptions, no API keys. Stripe went a different direction, building MPP on top of Paradigm-backed Tempo, a blockchain purpose-built for fast, cheap stablecoin settlement. Different architectures, same bet: AI systems are going to need a way to pay for compute, data and services in real time, and traditional payment rails won't keep up.
Should we read much into the $25 million versus $5,000 gap? Not really. Both numbers are tiny. The more useful question is whether machine-to-machine payments become a serious category at all. Bernstein thinks they will, eventually, but isn't hanging the trade on it. USDC is growing fast across payments, fintech and settlement. Circle and Coinbase are the most direct way to get exposure. If agentic payments take off on top of that, it's upside. If they don't, the underlying story still stands.
Why this matters: Bernstein is making the case that stablecoins are no longer just a crypto sub-plot. They're becoming a standalone financial services category with growth that doesn't depend on bitcoin bull markets. The fact that Coinbase, Stripe and a major Wall Street firm are all converging on the same agentic payments thesis, even at this early stage, suggests the idea has legs beyond the hype cycle.
