The Shocking Truth of How AI Agents will use Crypto & Stablecoins! | Neeraj Prasad
Thinking Crypto News & Interviews
October 9, 2026
Neeraj Prasad, Chief Engineer at MoonPay, joined me to discuss the rise of the AI agent economy, how autonomous AI agents will leverage stablecoins for payments and transactions, and how MoonPay is building the infrastructure to power this emerging market.
Speakers Neeraj Prasad, Tony Edward
TopicsTechnologyBusinessInvesting
Neeraj Prasad (0:00)
Have you heard of the term recursive superintelligence?
Tony Edward (0:02)
I have not.
Neeraj Prasad (0:03)
What it means is, when will intelligence, OpenAI, ChatGBT, Claude, get to a point where it's able to improve itself? Once that point hits, once it's recursive, intelligence is going to be on an exponential, and it's never gonna be stopped, because it'll just continually improve itself. You won't even need these researchers in the loop. That's when I see a world where you're going to have easily hundreds of agents per person, fully operationalize a person's life to the maximal extent. That does serve a transaction volume problem.
And I think traditional Web2 payment platforms aren't prepared for that.
Tony Edward (0:40)
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Neeraj Prasad (2:31)
Thanks for having me on. Pleasure.
Tony Edward (2:33)
Yeah, I'm looking forward to this conversation because I'm very fascinated by the agentic economy and how that's going to dovetail with crypto and the on-chain economy. You are at the forefront of building a lot of these things. But before we get there, tell us about where you hail from and what's your professional background.
Neeraj Prasad (2:53)
Yeah, I grew up in Virginia and Virginia borders DC. So everyone there worked for the government as a government contractor. So it's this unique ecosystem where you have a lot of engineering or engineering adjacent folks, maybe beside Silicon Valley in New York. So I got to grow up in an environment where there was a lot of engineering and science focus. And as a kid, I really loved plants. And so I would go around and memorize what the different plant species were. And to this day, I can identify plant families very, very easily. And I was also loved math, science, engineering, and the rest. And so I graduated from one of the most interesting high schools in the country, TJ.
And then went to MIT in Boston.
And now I'm here.
Tony Edward (3:57)
What was your first encounter with Bitcoin and crypto? What was your aha moment?
Neeraj Prasad (4:02)
My first encounter was actually at MIT or freshman year. Everyone in the class two years above us got 100 Bitcoin.
Tony Edward (4:11)
What?
Neeraj Prasad (4:12)
They got 100 Bitcoin. It was given to them in a crypto wallet, which back then was obviously like you're given this like very long hard-to-read passkey, right? And so you don't know what's going on. And so nobody knew what the hell this Bitcoin was. Everybody was kind of ignoring it. This is like, I want to say 2018 No, this is 2015 This is around 2015 So people don't really know what it is. At the time, obviously, it's very cheap. That's why you can afford to give it. And so the majority of the people in that class actually had lost that pass and they had no idea where it was kept. It was not in any email. And so they all lost access to it. But that was the first time I heard about it because many years later, everybody's like, oh my God, we just lost $10 million.
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