Lyneth Labs

Join us tomorrow as we celebrate the first chapter of the ERC-8004 ecosystem. 🎉 8004 Launch Day is a virtual showcase marking the mainnet launch of ERC-8004, highlighting the builders and contributors shaping the first wave of agent-native systems on Ethereum. Register here: luma.com/658en7zs

You need to be paying attention to the evolution of the machine economy Circle and Stripe are racing to replace credit cards with stablecoin rails for machine-to-machine commerce i) Circle with Arc + nanopayments ii) Stripe with Tempo (built with Paradigm, $500M raised, Visa/Mastercard/Shopify as partners) & $1.1B+ spent acquiring stablecoin infrastructure (including Bridge) The argument is that card fees and settlement windows are incompatible with agents paying fractions of a cent for API calls thousands of times a day Stablecoins are the only rails that work at that frequency and cost Circle CEO (@jerallaire) framed the real opportunity on earnings as not “agents buying on Amazon” but everything AIs consume from each other; pure machine-to-machine The Citrini Research report imagined agents circumventing card networks; this sent Visa, Mastercard, and Amex stocks down 5% Why do you think Mastercard and VISA are going balls to the wall for their own agentic stablecoin payment initiatives? When you look at the numbers it’s clear the opportunity is still early; There’s only been $24M in x402 volume over the past 30 days; 40,000 (half decent) agents on-chain; $50M total agent payment activity Compare that against $46T annual stablecoin settlement volume. Yes, it won’t be replaced immediately, but all these large payment giants wouldn’t be entertaining it if they didn’t think the opportunity was material! Near-term path is likely coexistence, but ultimately I believe stablecoin payment rails will become THE future of finance, and in particular for machines It’s likely this will look like virtual cards that settle on the back end via stablecoins until the front end/ typical payment UIs evolves Every concrete product cited in the Bloomberg article is x402 compatible: - Stripe on Base - CoinGecko’s pay-per-request API - MoonPay Agents - Coinbase’s agent wallets PS: It’s ironic that the archaic payment rails are being used to access this article - switch it to APIs or x402!! Allow my agent to pay to access it - you’re missing a trick here Bloomberg! TLDR: The big dogs are entering machine payments and it compliments x402 adoption