Level Playing Field
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Fun time talking agentic payments with @coinbase alum @dwr yesterday at @stripe Sessions. Recapping a few takeaways: 1) Cards and stablecoins can and will co-exist. Stablecoins aren’t a replacement, they’re an expansion. The world has a whole new category of buyers (Agents) who will outnumber humans and drive the internet economy. They will create net-new payment flows (e.g., machine to machine payments, streaming payments) that cards were never really built for — stablecoins are always on, programmable money that are natively designed for these new types of payments. Cards will continue to thrive (and accelerate) with agents driving traditional payment flows. 2) Intents are the new interface. The internet we know is built around a common flow: browse, select, checkout. Going forward, this will be collapsed into an intent (e.g., book me travel) — an figures out the rest. We’re going from visual marketplaces for humans to programmable marketplaces for agents. How humans interact with the interact will fundamentally change. 3) Agents transact differently than humans. Agents don’t have identity like humans do. Agents transact at machine speed and machine scale. Agents are rational and ruthless optimizers (e.g., brand loyalty isn’t a consideration). Agents will optimize across payment rails, choosing the best method for each use-case. Stablecoins are well suited for granular machine-scale payments and programmable transactions. 4) It’s early days. The infrastructure exists, but it’s still early. Agents need more robust standards for identity and authorization, broader acceptance, and trust and safety tooling. It’s early, but watch this space — you won’t want to miss out on the billions of new customers (agents) that are looking to access services on the web.



JUST IN: Google $GOOGL signs classified AI deal with the Pentagon.




