Anchorage CEO says AI agents need bank accounts for 'The Jetsons'-like future
Anchorage Digital CEO Nathan McCauley envisions AI agents as future "first-class economic actors" operating like "The Jetsons" across cash, card, and crypto rails, as the crypto-native bank doubles down on agentic banking.
In an interview with The Block's Kelvin Sparks at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium 2026, McCauley said that the firm has built an agentic banking platform with a "know-your-agent" setup to facilitate such transactions.
"We think that over time they're going to be first-class economic actors, where they're not just advising, but they're actually carrying out the transactions," McCauley said, adding that what's essential is a set of controls and structures that "allow them to interact both on-chain and with cards and with traditional rails."
"If you think of how in science fiction people interact with their agents,…'The Jetsons' is one example. You've got Jarvis as another example," he added.
In May, Anchorage Digital — a crypto financial services provider and a federally chartered crypto bank — launched Agentic Banking, an institutional platform for AI-driven finance. It provides a trust, governance, and settlement layer that allows institutions to fund and control AI agents operating on their behalf, according to its website.
McCauley told The Block that while agents can already use some on-chain services and stablecoins, the wider economy has not fully migrated to crypto rails. "We want to package all that up, make it available to agents, and really kind of enable that next stage of commerce and transactional activity," he said.
Bank accounts for agents
The Anchorage founder also suggested that enabling agent-driven commerce would require more than simply giving AI systems a way to make payments. Agents would need broader banking capabilities that allow them to both send and receive funds.
"We think that agentic payments isn't really the right mechanism because actually what they need is — they need bank accounts," McCauley said. "The agents themselves need to be able to get paid, to be able to take in money, spend it, and then be able to accept it in a real agnostic way."
McCauley also expects a surge of agent-driven smaller transactions, with blockchain networks well suited to facilitating microtransactions.
"[Blockchain] gas fees are actually a form of microtransactions, a small payment for a service. And so extending that notion out to agents where agents might be — rather than subscribing to services — they might be paying just for a single API call, and some of those microtransaction use cases might be useful," he added.
