One framework for understanding the success of the internet is it view it through the lens of coordination. Accordingly, we can reduce the success of the most valuable internet applications to their ability to more granularly coordinate human intents — both explicit and implicit. Amazon coordinates commercial intents. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter coordinate social intents. Uber and Doordash coordinate ride hailing and delivery intents. And Google coordinates informational/search intents by matching queries with relevant web content.
Shoutout to @PD for the visual:
It is becoming increasingly clear that ai agents will underpin the next logical evolution in how we coordinate at scale. While today our “intents” are fulfilled through searching, downloading and interfacing with applications on the internet, it seems reasonable to assume that in near future our “intents” will instead be executed by a network of ai agents working together on our behalf.
The Role of Crypto Rails
Logically, there has been a lot of speculation around why blockchains could serve as the economic substrate for this agentic economy. However, as is the case with most emerging crypto verticals, the bull case has been reduced to a more palatable narrative that lacks nuance.
Namely, the idea that “agents can’t have bank accounts, so they will use crypto wallets instead” seems to miss the fundamental value prop of crypto rails. It is not about access. Agents can by all means have bank accounts under an FBO (For Benefit Of) account structure. Companies like Stripe and PayPal for example already manage millions of sub-accounts under a single FBO account structure. There’s no fundamental reason why AI agents couldn’t be managed this same way – each with their own virtual sub-account tracked by the platform but pooled at the bank level. In fact, Stripe recently announced they will be adding support for agentic transactions under a similar account structure.
Today(), @stripe is launching a SDK built for AI agents:
– LLMs can call payment, billing, issuing, etc APIs
– Integrates with @vercel, @LangChainAI, @crewAIInc
– Use any model via functions (w/ per token billing)Excited what you, and your bots, build: https://t.co/3GiXmNm6en
— Jeff Weinstein (@jeff_weinstein) November 14, 2024
Additionally, the argument that “this would undermine the autonomy of ai agents” is also reductive. At the end of the day, someone will be managing the private keys of some ai agent and thus they