Key Takeaways
- Coinbase and Tetra’s CEOs publicly disagree on whether stablecoin-powered AI agent payments are months or years away.
- Symbiotic’s COO argues political will, not regulatory understanding, has been the real barrier to institutional adoption.
- Blockchain Futurist founder Tracy Leparulo says financial inclusion has faded from an industry conversation it once dominated.
Multiple executives sat down with CCN at the Blockchain Futurist Conference in Toronto on July 21st and 22nd, and the interviews surfaced a sharper split over agentic payments than the industry’s public messaging suggests, alongside a candid reckoning about what crypto stopped talking about on its way to institutional legitimacy.
Coinbase and Tetra Disagree on When AI Agents Actually Pay
Coinbase Canada CEO Eric Richmond placed the timeline in months. He argued stablecoins provide the programmable money layer autonomous software requires, and that legacy infrastructure simply cannot accommodate it.
“You can’t really have traditional rails interact in a seamless fashion with these AI agents,” Richmond said, pointing to Claude and OpenAI’s Codex as evidence the underlying capability is compounding fast enough to pull payments along with it.
Didier Lavallée, founder and CEO of Tetra Digital Group, drew the opposite conclusion from the same evidence.
“I don’t think the real use cases at scale are here,” he said. “I think it’s proving out that the technology can work.” His strongest concession was on micropayments, where traditional rails cannot economically clear sub-cent transactions at volume, and where he acknowledged blockchain is “a far superior layer of infrastructure to do that activity.”
On agents more broadly, he was blunt: “Agents, in terms of payments, I think it’s buzzworthy. It gains a lot of attention, but today there’s not a tremendous amount of use cases.”
The gap matters commercially. Coinbase is building toward what it calls an “everything exchange,” with derivatives for Canadian permitted clients launching within weeks and CIRO dealer status targeted for early 2027. Tetra launched its CADD stablecoin across Ethereum, Base and Tempo, betting on payment infrastructure rather than agent demand.
Regulation Stopped Being the Bottleneck
Symbiotic COO Jillian Friedman, who founded a crypto-focused law firm in 2014, dismantled the industry’s favorite explanation for slow institutional adoption.
Regulators, she argued, have built genuine internal expertise, and the speed with which policy shifts after a change in government proves it.
“It actually just demonstrates that it’s not a lack of understanding if you have the right resources,” Friedman said. “When a regime changes, all of a sudden they have all the knowledge and they’re ready to make decisions and open doors to clear the path for the industry. It wasn’t the knowledge keeping them back. It’s the political will.”
She also punctured the assumption that clarity itself would unlock capital.
“We thought that the dam would be broken once the regulations were clear,” Friedman said. It was not.
Richmond backed the Bank of Canada as the right supervisor for the country’s incoming stablecoin regime, citing expertise built during its CBDC research, and pushed for stablecoin rewards to survive the final framework. Coinbase currently pays Canadian customers roughly 3% on USDC under a Canadian Securities Administrators exemption. “It’s hard for me to understand why we wouldn’t want to provide these rewards to stablecoin customers and the end users,” he said.
Lavallée called Canada’s position more starkly: the only G7 country without a national real-time payment rail after roughly nine years of work. “Is there an argument to be made that the banks should be leapfrogging the modernization into stablecoin because they’re already behind?” he asked.
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Yield Has To Come From Somewhere Real Now
Friedman described the previous cycle’s capital as mercenary, chasing points and airdrops before rotating out. “That’s not really a sustainable, value-creating business model,” she said.
Anvil Research Labs CEO Maximillian Schwartz is building in that direction, using overcollateralized letters of credit to let merchants underwrite their own buy-now-pay-later offerings.
“Any merchant, anyone that accepts payments, can be the BNPL,” Schwartz said. “They can be their own bank.”
His success metric deliberately excludes the number that the industry usually cites. “A lot of people go to TVL, but TVL can be somewhat misleading,” he said. “It’s really easy to game.”
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Blockchain Futurist Founder Reflects on Crypto’s Changing Priorities
Tracy Leparulo, founder of Untraceable and the Blockchain Futurist Conference, offered the event’s most uncomfortable observation in exclusive comments to CCN.
When she organized Canada’s first Bitcoin Expo in 2014, she said, “nearly half the conversations on stage were about financial inclusion, social impact, and serving the unbanked. It was one of the industry’s core missions.”
As of July 2026, that has changed.
“Today, that conversation isn’t as prominent at many events, and I think it’s something we need to bring back,” Leparulo said.
When asked what she got wrong in 2013, her answer was the same theme: “I genuinely believed the entire industry was united around financial inclusion and empowering the unbanked. As the industry matured, it became clear that not everyone was driven by the same purpose.”
The conference itself nearly did not survive the gap between those eras. Sponsorships evaporated in 2019, then COVID forced a virtual pivot. “Those were by far the toughest years,” Leparulo said. “What kept us going was our belief that this industry was here to stay.”
She also noted that “our expansion came after Blockchain Futurist Conference was acquired by Emerald, one of North America’s largest B2B event companies. Their support gave us the opportunity to expand into Florida—a global hub for blockchain, digital assets, and fintech, with a thriving ecosystem of founders, investors, and innovators. It was a natural next step for the brand. Toronto will always be where the Blockchain Futurist Conference began, but our focus today is building a broader North American platform that brings together the best talent, companies, and capital across both markets.”
Leparulo said bringing Web3 to life will always remain at the core of the Blockchain Futurist Conference.
“We take a blue ocean approach. When everyone zigs, we zag,” she said, adding that while many institutional finance events now incorporate crypto and digital assets, “that’s not the space we’re trying to occupy.”
Instead, she said, the conference is built for the broader Web3 community.
“We’re here for the broader Web3 community. We create immersive experiences that bring founders, builders, investors, and users together in environments designed for networking, collaboration, and deal-making.” That focus extends beyond hosting panels, she added: “We don’t just host a conference—we create the experience. That’s what has made us different, and that’s what will keep us relevant.”
The near-term tests are also dated. Canada’s stablecoin regulations are expected in the second half of 2026, taking effect in 2027, the same window in which Coinbase expects CIRO registration.
Whether Richmond or Lavallée is right about agentic payments should be measurable well before then.
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Dr. Guneet Kaur is a senior editor at CCN.com and a Science Fellow at Exponential Science. She is a fintech and blockchain expert with extensive experience in digital finance education, blockchain ecosystems, and cryptocurrency markets. She has worked with global media such as Cointelegraph, as well as education and blockchain platforms, to design and lead strategic content and learning initiatives. As an educator and assessor for top-tier executive programs, she bridges real-world fintech trends with academic insight.
Dr. Kaur is also a published researcher and peer reviewer across fintech and data science journals, including Financial Innovation Journal and International Journal of Big Data Intelligence and Applications. Her work spans data-driven analysis, Web3 innovation, and technical content development. With a strong foundation in both industry and academia, she translates complex financial technologies into practical applications, empowering learners, professionals, and institutions across the rapidly evolving digital finance landscape.
