Intelligence Is Becoming Electricity

When I was a kid, getting online meant tying up the phone line. If I was on the internet, nobody in the house could make a call. I didn't think twice about it back then. That's just how the internet worked.

Looking back, it's wild. One person going online could disrupt the whole household. The internet wasn't something running quietly in the background. It was a place you went, and everyone knew when you were there.

That's where AI is right now. We open ChatGPT. We open Grok. We pick favorites and argue about which one is smartest. It's loud, it's new, and it's the center of attention.

This is the dial-up era. The chatbot wars are the screech.

Here's where I think this goes: intelligence is becoming electricity.

You don't visit electricity. You don't have a favorite brand of it. You flip a switch, it's there, and you pay for what you use.

That's where AI is headed. Not an app you open. Intelligence wired into everything, running in the background, billed by the unit.

I'll be honest, I can't picture that yet. AI is too new and too loud to imagine it ever going quiet. But nobody sitting through the dial-up screech pictured the internet living in their pocket either. The thing that's hardest to imagine fading into the background is usually the thing that's about to.

When something becomes a utility, the money follows the meter. And every meter needs a way to get paid.

Your power company sends one bill a month. Metered intelligence is different. It's millions of tiny charges, pennies or less per task. And more and more of them won't come from people. They'll come from AI agents doing work for us: buying data, paying for compute, hiring other agents.

A card swipe can cost more in fees than a 30-cent payment is worth. Banks close on weekends. Agents don't.

So what are the machines using? Crypto.

This isn't a prediction. In May 2025, Coinbase launched x402, a standard that lets AI agents pay for services directly in stablecoins, right over the web. No bank account. No card. No human tapping “confirm.”

Coinbase now counts roughly 480,000 agents on it, 165 million transactions, and about $50 million in volume. Do the math and that's about 30 cents a payment.

That's what a meter looks like.

Here's my read on why this is happening now.

The crypto craze died down over the past few years. AI took its spot as the technology changing the world, and it happened fast, partly because AI is so much easier for people to understand.

But that shift is exactly what sets up crypto's next chapter. Agents are getting better every month, and people want to send them out to get things done. When an agent needs to pay for something, digital money is simply easier for it to use than money sitting in a bank.

I've said it before: AI agents will be crypto's first real users. Turns out they already are.

Fair objection: electricity stopped getting better. AI hasn't. There's always a smarter model to sell at a premium, so maybe intelligence never becomes a boring utility.

Maybe. But look at how it's already sold: by the token, by the task, by the unit. The frontier keeps moving. The meter keeps running.

Here's my favorite part of this story.

The 402 in x402 comes from an error code, “402 Payment Required,” written into the web's rules decades ago. It was reserved for digital payments, and then it just sat there. Unused. For decades.

Nobody had a use for it. Now the machines do.

The payment slot was built into the internet from the start. It was waiting for its real user to show up.

It wasn't us.

The machines don't need convincing. The only question is whether you'll own any of it before they do.