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BasedAI CEO Teana Baker-Taylor says AI makes crypto finally click

We're building x402B: the secure commerce infrastructure for the Agentic Economy. Extends x402 to trust-minimized commerce — for any asset, any value, any counterparty. x402B Build Update: ✓ MVP code complete ✓ E2E tests in motion → Next: deploy to testnet ✓ On schedule

The Agent Economy Has a Trillion-Dollar Blindspot. Here’s How We’re Solving It. The agent economy isn’t “arriving”. It’s been here. While it’s projected to grow to trillions by 2030, AI agents are already deeply embedded in purchasing. Amazon’s Rufus led to over $12 billion in incremental sales in 2025 across 300 million users. AI-referred retail traffic was up 805% YoY during Black Friday 2025. In a six-month window, Google, PayPal, Shopify, Stripe, OpenAI, Coinbase, and Visa all shipped agent commerce infrastructure to power this wave. And that was before agent capabilities exploded in early 2026. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong: “Very soon there are going to be more AI agents than humans making transactions. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison: “In the not-too-distant future, agents will account for most transactions online” Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke: "We're making every Shopify store agent-ready by default" Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai: "Soon you'll see a buy button directly on Google surfaces including AI Mode in Search and Gemini" Learning from History By the mid-1990s, all the technology behind e-commerce existed, albeit in rudimentary form. Amazon and eBay had both launched to some aplomb, garnering attention and viral growth. But people weren’t buying: Amazon’s first-year revenue was a paltry ~$500,000. eBay was only doing $10,000 a month in 1996. And despite nostalgic narratives about the Internet’s explosive growth, it didn’t change commerce all that quickly. By the year 2000, only 22% of Americans had bought something online. US e-commerce did just $27B — less than 1% of America’s $3T+ total retail. The missing factor? Trust. No one trusted e-commerce sites. 86% of shoppers were concerned about unknown parties getting their info. Entering your credit card details into a website felt like staring into the abyss. Slowly, the trust layer was built up. PayPal launched buyer protection, Visa freed cardholders from liability for fraudulent charges, and Amazon launched a no-questions-asked refund policy. As more and more big players followed suit, adding trust to every step of online shopping, demand was finally unleashed, and online shopping became a way of life for billions of consumers. Having your agent buy things for you isn’t easy yet because the trust layer is missing. No end-to-end AI shopping eval exists. Existing benchmarks are limited and gameable, and closed-source labs grade their own homework. OpenAI doesn’t publish their shopping accuracy, instead mysteriously rolling back their Instant Checkout feature after just a month. Platforms like Amazon and Shopify are incentivized keep shopping data in-house. What We’re Doing About It We're building the trust layer for AI shopping, powered by open-source competition on Bittensor. Each week, we pay miners from around the world $80,000+ to compete to build the best shopping agent. And it’s working – we’re nearing 4000 agents submitted in just a few weeks, with hundreds added every day. Our top agents beat SOTA in a matter of weeks, but we aren’t satisfied. We use what we learn from hosting this competition to continually improve both agent performance and our eval – because the better the eval, the more trust we can add to every agentic transaction. There are dozens of untapped avenues to improve how shopping agents are evaluated – from sourcing catalogues for long-tail SKUs to generating synthetic data to changing the structure of our competition itself. Every week, we’re tapping more and more of those rich veins of opportunity until we are the de-facto standard for not just shopping agent performance, but how these agents are evaluated. The Hidden Benefit There’s a hidden benefit to building something as overlooked as a trust layer. Whoever builds the end-to-end gold standard for “does this agent actually work?” becomes the trust layer. But it doesn’t end there. Trust layers become protocols. And protocols become the most valuable companies in any market. Just look at Visa. Visa doesn’t make or sell any products itself. Instead, it’s the trust & verification layer for online transactions, sitting between buyer and seller. Its tiny take rate of ~0.2% on over $15 trillion in annual transaction volume is enough to net it a valuation of $550 billion. At Oro, we aim to do the same for AI shopping. Becoming the trust layer enables us to undergird agent-to-agent purchases, merchant access, and all the other pieces of agentic commerce. That’s our Holy Grail. After all, if you look where everyone else is looking, you’ll find what everyone else is finding. That’s why Oro is breaking the overlooked bottleneck of AI shopping – trust.

just wait until people realize what happens when you combine regulatory clarity + financial ai agents