Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin used the opening day of ETHDenver 2026 to outline what could become a structural shift in how digital services are priced.
He argued that AI agents may push the internet away from flat monthly subscriptions and toward granular, pay-per-use payments.
For more than a decade, crypto advocates have argued that blockchains could enable micro-pricing and more precise allocation of resources. The limitation, Buterin suggested, was not technical infrastructure alone but human bandwidth.
"If there has to be one big reason" why earlier ideas such as micro-pricing and optimal market allocation did not advance further, he said, it was "limits to human attention."
That constraint may now be loosening.
Today, many digital services default to flat subscriptions because pay per use is too complicated, Buterin said. But in a world where AI agents manage spending decisions, that logic changes.
"I actually think things will go pay per use whether people like it or not," he added, on the basis that autonomous systems will learn to optimize consumption and "figure out how to hack around" flat pricing structures to extract surplus more efficiently.
The vision itself is not new. Ethereum has long promised more granular, market-based allocation of digital resources. Now, AI agents may finally make that model usable.
The shift Buterin described comes as Ethereum’s role in global dollar flows is expanding, including as a host for tokens pegged to fiat currencies.
Speaking at the event, Maria Shen, general partner at venture firm Electric Capital, argued that the dominant macro trend is not de-dollarization but rather "the largest expansion of the dollar’s network effects in decades."
Stablecoins, she said, are enabling "anyone with internet access" to hold and transact in US dollars without a bank. "Millions [are] currently becoming new dollar holders through stablecoins," Shen added, pointing to adoption in countries such as India, Vietnam and Nigeria.
Those holders are not passive, "they want to put their money to work" in search of yield, borrowing opportunities and cross-border payments in dollar-denominated digital assets, she said. Ethereum, in her view, is "uniquely positioned" to host the global financial infrastructure for a new digital-dollar economy thanks to its decentralization and more than $160bn in stablecoins already on the network.
That AI-stablecoin narrative was paired with a forward-looking bet on how those dollars might move in the coming years.
Joseph Chalom, co-CEO of Ethereum treasury company Sharplink and former head of digital assets at BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, argued that the AI agent economy is "not really factored into the price of ETH."
As AI systems evolve from assistants to autonomous agents, he said, they will begin transacting with one another directly. "You’re going to end up building an agentic machine economy like we’ve never seen before," Chalom said, adding that such systems would require transaction volume and throughput "10,000x of what we’re seeing today."
Those agents, he said, "are going to have to pay one another in something. It’s going to be a stablecoin. It’s going to happen on Ethereum." Sharplink is one of the largest corporate holders of Ethereum's native token, with 867,798 ETH on its balance sheet, according to its website.
Despite the enthusiastic theme of that conference panel, Ethereum is entering an austerity phase where Buterin is actively redirecting capital toward core infrastructure over speculative ecosystem grants. The Ethereum Foundation, which manages the core development of the network, is currently focusing on long-term sustainability and tightening its spending as it faces fierce competition from rival networks.
This financial pivot is backed by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and arrives at a time when the crypto market is battling strong macroeconomic headwinds and severe liquidity constraints.
ETHDenver 2026 runs from 18–21 Feb in Denver, Colorado, bringing together developers, investors and industry executives focused on the Ethereum ecosystem.
