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QUEENSTOWN, New Zealand, Sept. 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — James Pinch, Managing Director of KuCoin in Australia, spoke at Crypto Winter 2026 in Queenstown, on a panel titled “Stablecoins and Agentic AI: powering the future of online commerce.” Moderated by Jasmine Wilson, the session examined what agentic finance looks like in practice and what must be true for it to scale safely.
Pinch said the strongest live use of agent-initiated stablecoin payments is still narrow and mostly invisible: machines buying inputs from other machines, in small amounts and at high frequency, with no person involved. What is new, he argued, is not speed but the transaction models these payments enable.
On where exchanges fit, he described three unglamorous but unavoidable functions: someone has to hold the asset, someone has to move between an on-chain dollar and the currency people pay their rent in, and someone has to know who that person is. “A blockchain can show where value moved, but it cannot, by itself, establish who is behind every wallet,” he said. He noted that KuCoin’s Australian entity is AUSTRAC-registered and AFSL-licensed, and that Australia’s incoming Digital Assets Framework will formalise that.
Asked whether stablecoins would be used on-chain or sit behind familiar payment experiences, Pinch said the rail matters less than the behaviour. He pointed to KuCard, where a customer holds USDC, taps their phone, and the payment completes over the card rails they already use. “The shift that matters is behavioural, not technical,” he said. “People adopt payment methods that require the least of them.”
He closed on recourse. People use cards, he argued, because they know what happens when something goes wrong: the card is stolen, they ring the bank, and there is a chargeback. “That is the product. The rail is incidental.” No equivalent exists yet for stablecoin or agent-initiated payments, which makes present caution reasonable rather than irrational. “This is not a question of whether it happens, but how long it takes. Until there is somewhere to go when something goes wrong, adoption will be slow.”
About KuCoin
Founded in 2017, KuCoin is a leading global crypto platform built on trust and security, serving over 45 million users across 200+ countries and regions. Known for its reliability and user-first approach, the platform combines advanced technology, deep liquidity, and strong security safeguards to deliver a seamless trading experience. KuCoin provides access to 1,500+ digital assets through a broad product suite and remains committed to building transparent, compliant, and user-centric digital asset infrastructure for the future of finance, backed by SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, ISO/IEC 27701:2019, ISO 22301:2019 and ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certifications. In recent years, KuCoin has built a strong global compliance foundation, marked by key milestones including AUSTRAC registration in Australia, a MiCA license in Europe, and regulatory progress in other markets.
Learn more: www.kucoin.com
