Meta’s Data Chief Hints Your WhatsApp Chats Could Soon Settle in Stablecoins

Meta’s Chief Data Officer says the company is quietly building the plumbing for a world where you don’t just chat with businesses on WhatsApp — you pay them, through an AI agent, using stablecoins. Alex Schultz made the comments on CoinDesk Spotlight, and while there’s no product launch to point to yet, it’s a strong signal about where a company with billions of users wants crypto to fit into everyday life.

Speaking with host Sam Ewen, Schultz said agentic commerce — where automated AI assistants handle tasks and transactions on your behalf — “might be the next tier of business for our entire company.” He said Meta already has “over a million weekly active businesses with Meta agents,” a jump from “basically nothing at the start of the year,” according to CoinDesk.

Why stablecoins, and why it matters to you

The example Schultz gave was deliberately small: an AI agent booking a kid’s birthday party, checking calendars, finding a venue, and talking to other parents’ agents, all inside WhatsApp. But he said that logic scales up to supply chains, financial settlements, and cross-border trade — and stablecoins are the payment layer underneath all of it.

“We completely believe in the future of there being no wallets and digital payments being the whole future,” Schultz said. “Stablecoins are a big part of the solution.” He pointed to WeChat’s digital red envelope gifting and Line’s commerce tools in Japan, Thailand and Taiwan as proof that chat-based payments already work at massive scale in Asia.

For everyday holders, this matters because it hints at a future where stablecoins stop being something you have to actively seek out on an exchange and instead become an invisible part of messaging apps you already use — much the way tap-to-pay quietly took over in-store shopping.

The US is behind, according to Schultz

Schultz was blunt about where the US stands compared to Brazil and India, where he said Meta has more than a million small businesses conducting commerce directly inside WhatsApp conversations. “iMessage is such a lame platform in terms of its usage and what you can do with it,” he said, calling America’s reliance on it “very backwards.”

Fortune Business Insights projects conversational commerce could grow to $39.53 billion by 2034, largely driven by AI, CoinDesk reports — a market Meta clearly wants to own the messaging layer of, even if it isn’t the one issuing the money moving through it.

Learning from Libra’s collapse

The interview happened on the seventh anniversary of Facebook’s Libra announcement, the company’s earlier attempt to launch its own global cryptocurrency. Congress and regulators pushed back hard over fears about financial stability and Meta’s influence, and the project — rebranded Diem — was shut down in 2022.

Schultz’s tone this time was notably more cautious. “Maybe we said some stuff that annoyed some governments,” he said, before adding that “the history of the company is that we tend to be a partnership company on these things.” Rather than issuing its own coin, Meta’s current approach is to plug regulated, third-party stablecoins into WhatsApp and its other apps, letting Meta control the messaging and commerce experience while banks and stablecoin issuers handle the actual money.

That shift is possible partly because the regulatory climate has changed. With US stablecoin legislation now in place and a friendlier SEC, according to CoinDesk, Meta no longer needs to fight the same battles it did with Libra.

The missing piece: proving who you’re talking to

Schultz was candid about the biggest unsolved problem: verifying that an AI agent actually represents the business or person it claims to. “Decentralization, especially if we can take verification outside of our system — my God, it would be useful for us,” he said. “It would just be incredible if there was a decentralized service that we could just plug into.” He added that “really smart people have tried, and it’s not there yet.”

That’s a meaningful admission from a company Meta’s size: it’s actively looking for decentralized identity tools it doesn’t control, because trust is the missing ingredient for agents to safely handle payments. For crypto holders watching the space, it suggests real demand is building for decentralized identity and verification projects — even if Meta itself stays out of issuing coins this time around.

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