The machine economy has arrived and bots have wallets

Opinion by: Paige Xu, chief operating officer of OpenMind

We all love an Uber Eats moment. You tap your phone, and a burrito is en route. But what if, this time, no human driver is weaving through traffic to deliver it? Instead, a sidewalk robot hums along the pavement, guided by sensors and AI, or an autonomous car with a humanoid delivers it to your door, solving the last-mile problem.

The beauty of this experience lies in what you don’t see.

As it journeys across town, this robot is transacting on top of delivering the orders. It pays a toll with onchain dollars to cross a private smart road, and it tips a decentralized navigation oracle for the fastest detour. Then it tops up at a solar-powered kiosk with a micro-payment, and the moment it completes your delivery, it earns a service fee deposited into its own onchain treasury. This is what machine-to-machine commerce looks like. 

Bots with wallets

We’ve spent the past decade handing autonomy to algorithms, letting them recommend our music, curate our news, and trade our stocks. But now we’re giving that autonomy money — and with it, agency.

With access to decentralized finance (DeFi), smart contracts and machine-readable APIs, wallets unlock real autonomy for machines to negotiate terms in real-time with charging stations, service providers and peers; earn income by offering services like delivery, data collection and infrastructure maintenance; spend on operational needs, like fuel, repairs and software updates.

In essence, bots evolve from tools into agents, economic participants in their own right.

The rise of synthetic labor

For centuries, labor meant humans performing tasks for wages. These days, we’re witnessing the beginning of synthetic labor where robots and AI agents provide services and earn revenue onchain, potentially funding their own existence.

A delivery bot could choose between high-paying jobs based on market demand, a drone might dynamically price its services during a weather crisis, and an AI lawyer agent could bid on micro-contracts for startups needing quick regulatory reviews.

These agents are designed for optimization and certainly never take sick days. This shifts the nature of labor, value creation and even what it means to “work.”

According to Kevin Leffew, AgentKit lead at Coinbase Developer Platform, we’re entering an era where machines aren’t just tools but are actually participating in the economy. This is a structural shift in how software participates in markets by earning, spending and even operating independently.

Who gets paid and who gets replaced?

If your delivery robot earns income, the question arises of who owns that income? The company? The robot’s DAO? You, the user? Or perhaps… no one?

And if bots can transact, tip, charge and collaborate faster than humans, what happens to the people they replace?

Recent: DeFi can help us choose the best robots for the job

The machine economy promises efficiency but threatens to decentralize humans from the value chain. To make sense of it, we need new models of ownership. Maybe each citizen gets a stake in the bots operating in their city. Maybe delivery bots pay local taxes. Perhaps you get tokens for every delivery you accept.

Financial autonomy for AI creates a new class of actors that promise to drive value across the economic landscape and bring along new alignment challenges.

The hidden costs of convenience

The “autonomous machine economy” promise is seductive, as it means no middlemen or inefficiencies are involved. Machines that earn, spend and optimize themselves into the background of our lives are like Uber Eats meeting DeFi meeting Wall-E.

Could it be possible that, eventually, bots start outnumbering gig workers? Or could autonomous agents form DAOs that collectively own the infrastructure they operate on?

What happens when your delivery drone charges you more during peak hours, not because it’s evil, but because it’s rational and profit-maximizing?

Machines paying tolls and collaborating with other bots are a complete rewriting of the logic of markets with every microtransaction.

In this economy, code is labor, wallets are autonomy, and data is currency. Bots need constraints and accountability if they earn, spend and transact. A legal framework, not just a protocol.

If we don’t draw the lines now, the next time a robot shows up at your door, it might not just want to deliver your food; it might want to buy your house.

And guess what?

It already has the wallet for it.

Opinion by: Paige Xu, chief operating officer of OpenMind.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.