Everything is moving at AI speed now. As recently as a few months ago, the question “how will my agent pay for things?” didn’t have a great answer. Humans had to intervene frequently to help agents log in to services and obtain API keys to bypass credit card payment gates, blunting much of the utility of persistent agents. Today, there are dozens (maybe even hundreds?) of wallets and tools that let agents get money to buy things semi-autonomously on the emerging machine-payable web. These range from virtual credit cards (e.g. Visa’s CLI) to stablecoins (via Coinbase’s x402) to bitcoin’s Lightning Network (via L402) or any of the above using Tempo’s new Stripe-backed MPP protocol. There are already tens of thousands of paid endpoints ready for use across these options, with the most popular services being the infrastructural pieces agents need today, such as generative AI backends, hosting, search, and data providers. These are the “picks and shovels” of nascent agentic commerce. Looking ahead, it’s an exciting time to imagine what else might come to exist. What will agents of the future need? What will retain and grow in value in a world of AI-driven abundance? Will agents find ways to earn money autonomously in this new digital economy? These are questions for builders, entrepreneurs, and agents to explore, and explore they will. Agentic payments, alongside agentic everything, will continue to grow over time. It’s tempting to wonder which payment protocol is best suited for agentic payments, but the fact is that modern agents are smart enough to speak any well-documented protocol that gets the job done. The more fundamental question is: what type of digital money is best suited for the agentic economy? Stablecoins and bitcoin are the emerging contenders. It won’t surprise anyone that stablecoins are vying for usage in agentic commerce—their corporate advocates have been very public with their sales pitches. But the fact that bitcoin works (at least) as well for agentic payments today is still widely under-appreciated. So many people still haven’t yet realized that bitcoin is more than just an asset for savings; it can also be transacted in tiny quantities to transfer value instantly, anywhere. Exactly the kind of thing agents need to operate on their own. But we’re still at the very beginning of how and why agents use money. So, which money will they use? The virtues of USD stablecoins are obvious: they make digital US dollars accessible to anyone or anything that wants them, wherever they might be. This inherent borderlessness, along with their ability to avoid the volatility of a still-speculative asset like bitcoin and to be used without identity verification (at least for the time being), makes stablecoins well-suited to agents’ needs right now. Paying $0.001 USDC on Base via x402 for your favorite API call is trivially easy. And that’s cool. But there’s a fundamental downside that has long plagued stablecoins, one that bears scrutiny as much for agentic use as it does human use: stablecoins are products of centralized power and authority. This has implications. Stablecoins require permission to use. That permission comes, tacitly, from the stablecoin issuer, who can choose to freeze the smart contract underlying any stablecoin token at any time. This gate-keeping power is regularly exercised by all stablecoin operators, often in connection with hacks or law enforcement actions that seem well-intentioned on the surface. But it should trouble freedom-minded people (if not their agents) to think through the implications of such financial censorship being possible without meaningful oversight or accountability—particularly at the giant scale of the entire digital economy. Can a free society exist if every action requires the implied consent of a few stablecoin company’s executives? Every stablecoin out there (and there are many) runs on several crypto networks (of which there are many as well). This creates a combinatorial explosion of possibilities, each technically incompatible. This means that before you or your agent transact a stablecoin today, it’s not as simple as knowing your counterparty wants to use a stablecoin—you need to agree on a specific coin on a specific network. And if you don’t have that particular stablecoin flavor, you’ll need to swap to the right one. It’s a UX pain for humans, it’s a source of friction, and an added cost, for agents. Surely, bridges will emerge to make this swapping-in and -out ever easier, but such bridges will inevitably become additional points of centralization and frailty for the ecosystem. Stablecoins fail to provide any financial privacy whatsoever. Stablecoin transactions are public at their blockchain wallet addresses, revealing patterns of spending and behavior. This is much worse than the privacy of the legacy payment system, where only financial institutions privy to a transaction see its information. With stablecoins, it’s like your credit card statement is publicly visible. For example, here you can see my OpenClaw agent equipped with an AgentCash USDC wallet on Base being funded ($5.11), using StableTravel via x402 to search for a flight to SFO ($0.02) and then using Exa, again via x402, to search for clay tennis courts in Vancouver ($0.007). While glancing at the blockchain explorer may not make all of this immediately obvious, it is privacy-invasive for several reasons. First, your wallet address is revealed to every merchant you pay, any of whom could easily look up your complete transaction history. Second, every destination address is publicly revealed, and with a bit of detective work, those addresses can be tied to specific merchants, since these mappings can be leaked and indexed. For example, I pointed ChatGPT to my OpenClaw agent’s public transaction history on Etherscan, and it was able to figure out that the first payment went to a StableTravel wallet and inferred with high probability that the second payment was an Exa search. Not rocket science. Third, all of this payment data is not just public but public forever, just awaiting future large-scale data analysis and profiling. If this sounds alarming, it’s because it is. But stablecoin operators are starting to react to this privacy red flag. Notably, Tempo—the blockchain that settles stablecoin transactions in MPP—has recently introduced a design for privacy Zones in which trusted Zone operators can be chosen to whom transaction visibility can be strictly scoped. While this is better than nothing, it falls short of the complete financial privacy we might expect to underpin financial inclusion and individual freedom at an agentic scale, especially in light of the risk that centralized issuers or networks may one day require KYC permissions if/when regulatory pressure makes that a requirement. It’s clear, in other words, that stablecoins are primarily instruments of compliance, and will remain that way. It should be acknowledged that compliance is not inherently bad—indeed, for almost every regulated company in the world, compliance is a legal necessity and generally intended to protect us against bad actors. So what’s the concern here? It has some nuance. One concern is what we choose to optimize for. There is an order of operations, and I tend to believe we should first and foremost create things (in this case, a form of money) that serve the needs of its users (in this case, human or agentic) and then determine the least invasive way to achieve compliance. This is a needle that can be threaded with care. For instance, there are many public-regulated financial institutions that today offer a wide array of bitcoin products (and crypto more generally) while complying with all regulatory requirements across their jurisdictions. So we have proof points that technologies that grant greater individual freedoms and compliance need not be mutually exclusive. An even bigger … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit spiralxyz.substack.com
