AI is going to make it impossible to regulate crypto. Bots will move billions across borders in a heartbeat if they see even a tiny legal difference.
March 27, 2026
Original Paper
Stablecoin Monoculture, Cross-Chain Transmission, and Regulatory Competition: Agentic Payments in Tokenized Asset Markets across the U.S., Singapore, and HK SAR
SSRN · 6456219
The Takeaway
AI 'agents' eliminate the friction humans experience when switching between financial platforms. This creates a winner-take-all environment where even the smallest rule change triggers an immediate, total exit of capital from a jurisdiction, effectively ending a nation's ability to regulate its own markets.
From the abstract
We introduce the concept of agentic investment payment, in which autonomous AI systems algorithmically fuse investment decisions with payment execution in tokenized asset markets, and analyze the resulting regulatory competition across the United States, Singapore, and Hong Kong SAR. These three markets share a common settlement infrastructure but impose materially different regulatory costs on its use. We show that three interlocking mechanisms produce a self-reinforcing race to the bottom: age