Key Takeaways:
The first week of May 2026 marks a structural pivot in digital assets, shifting toward autonomous, AI-driven credit and payment settlement.
Kite launched its mainnet on the Avalanche blockchain on May 12, rolling out a vertically integrated payment infrastructure designed to allow artificial intelligence agents to transact on a user's behalf, targeting a stablecoin settlement market that reached $33 trillion in 2025. The launch positions a new competitor in the race to build the financial plumbing for a future machine-to-machine economy.
"The next battleground is money: whether ‘AI agents’ can pay for services on a user's behalf without turning spending into a security and compliance nightmare," Messari Research analyst Eric Manoukian said in a recent report, noting Kite’s attempt to solve the problem with its integrated stack.
The debut on Avalanche comes as publicly traded firms pivot toward similar "agentic finance" models. Bakkt Holdings (BKKT) is reorienting toward AI-powered fintech after its acquisition of an AI-native payment engine, while Morpho Labs has seen over 130,000 AI agents registered on the Base network to manage lending positions without human intervention, according to a May research note from Black Titan Corporation.
Kite’s success now depends on attracting developers and transaction volume to Avalanche, positioning it against well-funded competitors like Bakkt and decentralized protocols on Base. The key metric to watch will be the adoption of its payment stack by AI applications in a race to build the primary infrastructure for machine-to-machine commerce.
The move toward autonomous, agent-driven finance is not happening in a vacuum. It represents what some analysts call a "regime shift" where decentralized protocols are becoming the primary infrastructure for complex financial tasks. This follows a period where publicly traded digital asset firms faced significant headwinds in traditional brokerage operations.
Bakkt, for instance, saw its cryptocurrency-related revenues contract 77 percent in the first quarter, prompting a strategic pivot. In the company's May 11 earnings call, CEO Akshay Naheta described a global payments market akin to an "ocean" where stablecoin infrastructure is set to "cannibalize legacy rails." He noted that the addressable market is large enough that "a regulated infrastructure provider with disciplined capital allocation along with durable rails can build a material business."
This sentiment is echoed by the growth in underlying settlement volumes. The market for stablecoin settlement grew 72 percent year-over-year to $33 trillion in 2025, providing a massive current for companies like Kite, Bakkt, and others to sail on.
While the goal is similar, the approaches to building an AI-driven payment layer vary. Kite is building a vertically integrated stack on a specific Layer 1 blockchain, Avalanche, aiming to create a dedicated ecosystem. This could increase development activity and transaction volume on the network if it gains traction.
In contrast, Morpho Labs has taken a more modular approach on the Base network, separating its core infrastructure (Morpho Blue) from the strategy layer (MetaMorpho). This has successfully attracted institutional "Risk Curators" to manage bespoke credit markets using AI agents.
Meanwhile, Bakkt represents a more centralized, TradFi-centric model. By acquiring Distributed Technologies Research, it brought an AI-native payment engine in-house, which it plans to leverage with its U.S. money transmitter licenses to serve institutional clients. The convergence of these different models—decentralized, modular, and centralized—on the same problem of agentic finance indicates a significant market opportunity. The primary challenge remains moving from technical capability to widespread adoption and proving which architecture can scale most effectively.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
