EP-53 Sui's Bet on Payments, Stablecoins, and AI Agents

This episode features a public talk by OKX founder and CEO Star Xu at OKX NOW, the company's global product and ecosystem conference. Xu explores how the internet, crypto, and AI are converging to reshape financial services — from payments and investing to wealth management. He argues that the line between crypto and traditional finance will continue to blur, combining crypto's 24/7 markets, programmable money, global settlement, and self-custody with the liquidity and infrastructure of traditional finance. AI could accelerate that shift by transforming everything from software development and compliance to personalized financial services. In the future, Xu envisions AI agents that understand an individual's assets, risk preferences, and financial goals — potentially bringing private-banking-style services to a much broader audience. Timeline: 00:00 The Convergence of the Internet, Crypto, and AI 01:35 Why Financial Infrastructure Still Lags Behind the Internet 02:25 Why Cross-Border Payments Remain Expensive 03:20 From Early Experiment to Mainstream Finance: Crypto's Evolution 04:57 From Crypto Exchanges to Broader Financial Services 06:15 Four Trends Shaping the Next Generation of Finance 07:20 Could AI Give Everyone a "Private Banker"? 08:05 Why Global Finance Still Needs Regulation and Trust 09:21 Crypto and TradFi Are Moving Toward Convergence 10:55 How AI Could Change Financial Institutions 11:30 How AI Is Already Changing Software Development 12:15 AI in Customer Service, Fraud Prevention, and Compliance 13:46 AI Is Moving From Concept to Large-Scale Adoption 14:30 How the Internet, Crypto, and AI Could Reshape Finance 15:35 From Payments and Investing to AI-Powered Wealth Management

This episode features a public talk by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin at OKX NOW, OKX's global product and ecosystem conference themed "The Future Is Now." Vitalik explores how AI could reshape blockchain, privacy, and security. As zero-knowledge proofs and other cryptographic tools mature, he sees blockchains evolving beyond "programmable assets" toward "programmable data" — allowing users to prove facts without revealing the underlying information, a capability that could become increasingly important in the AI era. Vitalik also sees AI becoming a new interface for blockchain. Instead of relying on traditional apps, users could ask AI agents to write scripts and execute on-chain actions directly. But this creates new risks, from prompt injection to AI misinterpreting user intent. Looking ahead, he expects Ethereum to become cheaper and more private, with bots and AI agents playing a much larger role in how people interact on-chain — while security increasingly extends from software all the way down to hardware.

This episode features a public speech by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin at the 12th Global Blockchain Summit in Shanghai. Vitalik reviews how blockchain technology has evolved over the past 15 years, arguing that the industry is moving beyond blockchain alone toward a broader technological stack combining blockchains with zero-knowledge proofs, programmable cryptography, and other advanced tools. As data analytics and AI become increasingly powerful, the privacy assumptions of early public blockchains are no longer sufficient, creating a greater need for new cryptographic approaches to privacy, scalability, and security. Vitalik highlights technologies including SNARKs, STARKs, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and formal verification. He argues that zero-knowledge proofs are moving from long-term roadmaps into real protocols, while programmable cryptography could expand blockchain systems from determining "who can send what" to determining "who can see what." In this vision, blockchain will increasingly become a broader network encompassing L1s, L2s, off-chain computation, transaction pools, block building, and other components. He also argues that AI can accelerate the development, verification, and understanding of complex cryptographic systems. As zero-knowledge proofs become more efficient and technologies such as formal verification and quantum-safe cryptography advance, developers may gain new ways to build decentralized applications with stronger privacy, scalability, and security guarantees.

In this episode of Friends of OKX Wallet, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin discusses the long-term convergence of AI and crypto. He talks about the role Ethereum could play in the agent era: rather than serving as a traditional “operating system,” blockchain is better understood as a public data layer, an on-chain computation layer, and an economic layer for multi-party coordination. As AI agents begin to interact on-chain at scale, Ethereum will need to offer more than lower costs and higher throughput. It will also need stronger privacy, verifiable security, minimal identity disclosure, and an L2 ecosystem tailored to different application needs. Vitalik argues that humans will remain the users, while AI becomes a new interface and execution layer. Wallets may evolve from standalone products into secure software capability layers that AI can call and orchestrate. For identity, users should avoid revealing who they are in full, and instead prove only what is necessary, such as reputation or source of funds, through zero-knowledge proofs. On scaling, Vitalik says L2s should not simply copy the EVM. Instead, they should start from application needs and provide specific functions such as order matching, low-cost execution, or privacy. For Agent product experience, he emphasizes local AI, privacy, security, formal verification, and alignment with user interests. He also points to ZK Payments and ZK API as promising foundations for Agent-native payments and interaction standards.

Arthur Hayes updated his outlook on market liquidity and Bitcoin’s trajectory in his keynote, “21 Weeks Later,” delivered at the Bitcoin 2026 Vegas conference. Hayes argued that the market had previously been driven by an “AI deflation” thesis: AI boosts efficiency and puts pressure on high-paid white-collar jobs, which could weaken bank credit quality and weigh on Bitcoin and other risk assets. But as geopolitical tensions rise and the US shifts more clearly toward a wartime fiscal stance, he believes the market is starting to price in fiscal expansion, higher bank leverage, and a fresh wave of credit creation. He also argued that concerns over Kevin Warsh potentially becoming Fed chair and pursuing an aggressively hawkish balance-sheet reduction are overblown. In Hayes’s view, what is more likely is a structural reshuffling between the Fed’s balance sheet and those of commercial banks. With regulatory easing, commercial banks could take on more Treasuries and repo assets while expanding lending to defense, resource extraction, and AI infrastructure. Hayes believes this new credit creation could outweigh the drag AI has placed on jobs and legacy credit demand, allowing liquidity conditions to turn positive again. On that basis, he remains bullish on Bitcoin and expects further upside this year. Timeline: 00:00 Opening remarks 00:35 Why markets may treat the conflict as temporary 01:45 How AI deflation and job losses weighed on risk assets 03:24 The shift toward a wartime inflation and fiscal expansion narrative 05:51 Why Hayes questions the “super hawkish” Warsh view 06:49 A possible balance-sheet shift from the Fed to commercial banks 08:26 How banks could absorb more Treasuries and expand lending 10:00 Why Washington still shows no real appetite for austerity 11:23 Why US banks may become major buyers of new Treasury supply 12:09 Why banks could gain more room to lend