Stablecoins are a foundational payment innovation, not an incremental one. For emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs), the potential payoff is large. EMDEs also face distinct risks and challenges in adopting this innovation. This paper maps the opportunity that wider adoption could bring in agentic commerce, tokenization, smart contracting, cross-border remittances, and competition in financial markets; weighs the risks and challenges that come with it; sets out a regulatory blueprint to manage them; and closes with country-specific analysis of India, Brazil, and Indonesia.

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The internet is acquiring a second customer: software that retrieves, compares, and increasingly transacts on a person’s behalf. These agents do not watch ads and may have no billing relationship with the services they use. As AI systems crawl to answer rather than to refer, the bargain that financed the open web is breaking down. Publishers, developers, and data providers need a way to charge for each use, including transactions worth a fraction of a cent. This paper explains why legacy payment rails struggle to serve that market economically, why stablecoins on low-cost networks are the strongest fit available today, and how policymakers can help agentic commerce develop on open, interoperable standards rather than inside proprietary marketplaces.

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