visa just launched trusted agent protocol. mastercard has agent pay. openai built an agentic commerce protocol with stripe. google has universal commerce protocol. amazon has "buy for me." paypal launched agent-ready checkout.
every major payments company on earth is now building infrastructure for ai agents to spend money. in the last 90 days, the entire industry arrived at the same conclusion: agents are going to transact, and somebody needs to build the rails.
here's what's interesting about all of it.
every single one of these systems is centralized, permissioned, and siloed. visa's agents need visa tokens. mastercard's agents need mastercard credentials. openai's agents go through stripe. each one is a walled garden where the agent's economic identity is controlled by a single company.
that works fine when you're buying shoes from nordstrom through chatgpt.
it falls apart the second you have agents that need to pay other agents. an agent hiring a compute provider. an agent paying for api access across chains. an agent settling a data query fee in real time with no human in the loop. these aren't consumer checkout flows. these are machine-to-machine economic relationships that need programmable, permissionless payment rails.
the tradfi world is building agentic commerce for humans who delegate shopping tasks. the actual unlock is agent-to-agent economies where software pays software based on programmatic rules, budgets, and controls that the operator defines once and the system enforces autonomously.
the protocols being built right now will handle the first wave. the second wave needs something fundamentally different.
we're building for the second wave.
every major payments company on earth is now building infrastructure for ai agents to spend money. in the last 90 days, the entire industry arrived at the same conclusion: agents are going to transact, and somebody needs to build the rails.
here's what's interesting about all of it.
every single one of these systems is centralized, permissioned, and siloed. visa's agents need visa tokens. mastercard's agents need mastercard credentials. openai's agents go through stripe. each one is a walled garden where the agent's economic identity is controlled by a single company.
that works fine when you're buying shoes from nordstrom through chatgpt.
it falls apart the second you have agents that need to pay other agents. an agent hiring a compute provider. an agent paying for api access across chains. an agent settling a data query fee in real time with no human in the loop. these aren't consumer checkout flows. these are machine-to-machine economic relationships that need programmable, permissionless payment rails.
the tradfi world is building agentic commerce for humans who delegate shopping tasks. the actual unlock is agent-to-agent economies where software pays software based on programmatic rules, budgets, and controls that the operator defines once and the system enforces autonomously.
the protocols being built right now will handle the first wave. the second wave needs something fundamentally different.
we're building for the second wave.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
