Corey Cooper leads developer relations at Circle, where he helps developers build financial applications with USDC, smart contracts, and artificial intelligence. His central problem is making programmable money useful for automated commerce without surrendering control over consequential payments.
Earlier in his career, Cooper worked on enterprise software for the City of Atlanta and Accela. He also founded The Players Circle, applying his experience as a high-school basketball scout to software connecting amateur athletes with college coaches. At Circle, his work expanded from programmable-wallet applications and student developer education to privacy-preserving settlement, AI-assisted escrow, and payments between software agents.
AI-assisted escrow with USDC: Cooper’s freelance-payments prototype extracts payment terms and deliverables from an agreement, provisions wallets, and deposits funds into a Solidity contract. AI evaluates submitted work against those requirements before payment can be released.
Human approval for consequential payments: Cooper distinguishes experimental automation from production-ready financial controls. Because model outputs can vary while payment authorization demands predictability, he recommends using AI to assemble evidence and identify payments ready for review while keeping people responsible for final approval. Multisignature authorization can distribute that responsibility further.
Zero-knowledge payment verification: His work on privacy-preserving payment triggers examines how external financial events can activate smart contracts without exposing unnecessary transaction details.
Payment infrastructure that hides blockchain complexity: His AI Engineer World’s Fair demonstration considers cross-chain deposits and payouts, reusable contract factories, webhook monitoring, and gas abstraction. His writing about USDC on Arc extends that approach by describing how one USDC balance can support transaction fees and standard token operations.
Cooper’s more recent work explores agent-to-agent commerce, including autonomous micropayments for API access. He approaches those systems as financial infrastructure: programmable settlement operating continuously, with explicit conditions, visible transaction states, and safeguards proportionate to the money at stake.
