First gradually, then all at once. That’s how the emerging field of “agentic commerce” is starting to feel. I wrote about agentic commerce, which describes the idea of AI agents carrying purses of digital money to spend on our behalf, barely a month ago. But a series of recent developments suggest this new frontier of shopping is snapping into place sooner than expected—and that it could be a lot bigger than we imagine.
I spoke with Sam Ragsdale, a former a16z guy, whose startup is building a service called AgentCash that helps AI agents pay for premium APIs and other data. He is not a crypto diehard but told me that blockchains, with their instant settlement and tiny per-transaction costs, are the obvious technology to facilitate mass micro-payments.
That doesn’t mean it will work. The idea of using blockchain for micropayments has been kicked around for years, but failed to gain traction. The difference now, though, is the emerging field of AI commerce, which Ragsdale says is poised to add tens of millions of ordinary consumers to an API economy that has historically been limited to a relatively small pool of developers. This emerging group of new users, Ragsdale says, will likely include salespeople paying their agents to make API calls to collect data about new leads, rather than doing this by means of expensive software subscriptions.
It’s also easy to imagine people like me using agents capable of micropayments to buy snippets of financial data locked behind paywalls. Like many people who work in words, I’ve never had the interest or aptitude to code or write scripts, but have discovered that AI tools are quickly eliminating these technical barriers. It’s easy to imagine a future where I write plain English instructions to instruct an agent along the lines of, “Go build me this chart, and take $10 in USDC to get the data you need.”
It’s not as simple as all that, of course. In an incisive Twitter essay, Ragsdale warns that large AI companies will be tempted to direct us to walled gardens of API content—much like cable companies tried to sell the world wide web as a bundle of TV channels. But he predicts that open alternatives will defeat any closed walled garden offerings (they always do), and that the early movers in agentic commerce—Stripe and Coinbase—are so far supporting open tools in order to promote adoption. Ragsdale says, eventually, agentic commerce will be a “knife fight” as big companies put their thumb on the scale for a standard that favors them—but for now everyone is on the page to scale the industry 1000x by end of year to prove it’s viable.
All of these efforts got a fresh boost last week, thanks to a new open-source wallet standard for AI agents. The standard is a joint effort from a list of major crypto and payment players—including MoonPay, the Ethereum Foundation, Coinbase, PayPal, Ripple and the Solana Foundation—and will reduce friction when it comes to ensuring that, when someone sends their agent shopping, the merchant will have no trouble recognizing their wallets.
A final reason agentic commerce could arrive faster than we think is the nature of AI itself. In a recent interview with a16z crypto’s Guy Wuollet, I asked if he thought that the emergence of competing technological standards could impede the growth of this new industry. His response: “I think having a single, unifying standard is probably less important today than it was 25 or 30 years ago, because LLMs are so good at understanding syntax and writing software… I’m pretty optimistic that any software that exposes APIs will be very composable in the future.”
He’s right. The final question is when. If you’re looking for a dose of cold water, Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi says agentic commerce will be huge but that it will take years for adoption to jump from tinkerers to early adopters. I’m usually in the bearish camp, too but, given how fast things are moving in the AI era, I think this thing is arriving sooner than we think.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
DECENTRALIZED NEWS
A criminal trial revealed how “crypto fixers,” including a former LAPD cop, made money helping script-kiddie thieves obtain luxury cars and apartments. He then turned around and brutally robbed one. (LA Times)
The archrival CEOs of Polymarket and Kalshi are both investing in a new VC fund called 5c(c) Capital—the name is a nod to commodities legislation—that will invest in prediction market startups. (Fortune)
Miami-based XFX, which is building a platform that crosses forex and stablecoins, raised a $17 million Series A from Castle Island, Haun Ventures, and Coinbase. (Fortune)
Fannie Mae is now accepting crypto-backed mortgages—sort of. The mortgage is available if the buyer uses crypto to secure a loan for their down payment. (Fortune)
Binance’s share of the Bitcoin spot market was once as high as 77%, while its share of crypto derivatives was 76%, but those numbers have now fallen closer to 27% and 34%. Some claim the drop is partially tied to mistrust over the Oct. 10 flash crash. (Bloomberg)
MAIN CHARACTER OF THE WEEK
Love him or hate him, few in crypto are as good at commanding attention as Michael Saylor, who is ramping up Bitcoin purchases at a time when other DATs have gotten cold feet.
MEME O' THE MOMENT
Not crypto but pour one out for Sora, which is shutting down. The short-lived app from OpenAI gave us what one observer rightfully calls the greatest video of the AI era so far.
