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The deeper problem has always been at the technology level. The insoluble problem is that social networking as a technology offers extremely little functional or productivity benefits to its users. Technologies such as the internet, mobile phones, search, cloud computing, or AI all make us do things faster, cheaper, or better. The upside of these technologies is very clear, whether that is a startup having immediate and scalable access to state-of-the art IT-infrastructure, or a private individual not having to visit a bank branch any more. The reason social media became so successful, on the other hand, is because of addictive designs and dopamine loops, extreme polarization and sensationalist misinformation, echo chambers and hyper-targeting. Social networks have reached the vast majority of all humans, so the only way they can continue to grow their market is to make users spend more time and data on their platforms. To achieve that, they have to double down on these features that are detrimental to individuals and to society

From: (21) The End of the Social Media Era Is Coming – by Igor Pejic.

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All of this depends on one additional shift: stores have to become legible to agents. Product data must be structured and machine‑readable, inventory and pricing must be accurate, and policies for delivery, service, and returns must be exposed in ways agents can parse and reason about.

Physical performance feeds back into that loop. If reservations are unreliable, pickups are often wrong, or services underperform, agents have reasons to steer demand elsewhere over time. The line between “digital optimization” and “store operations” blurs. From an agent’s perspective, they are just different parts of the same execution layer.

In many flows, the first “customer” that must understand and trust a retailer is an AI system, not a person. The human still approves and experiences the result, but the early evaluation and routing increasingly happen in software. Execution‑first stores are the physical endpoints that make those software decisions look good or bad.

From: (20) The Agentic Commerce Frontier 📅 | April 27 – May 11 2026.

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New research from the Central Bank of Ireland, based on a nationally representative survey of almost 3,000 adults, reveals that 35% of Irish adults have fallen victim to financial fraud or scams, with nearly two-thirds of those affected suffering actual monetary losses and total reported payment fraud reaching €160 million in 2024 — a 24.5% rise on the previous year.

Online purchase scams were the most common type, affecting 48% of victims, followed by card fraud at 34%, with risky online behaviour identified as the single strongest predictor of fraud experience — more influential than age, income or education.

Critically, 38% of fraud victims never reported their experience to their bank or any authority, despite a clear correlation between reporting and recovery — victims who reported fraud recovered their money in 57% of cases, compared to just 13% among those who stayed silent.

From: (21) Scammed, Silent and Out of Pocket – Payments:Unpacked.

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It breaks down completely in an open ecosystem like MCP, where we have many clients talking to many servers. You can’t expect a developer of a new AI Agent to manually register with every single one of the 2,000 MCP servers in the MCP server registry. Plus, when a new MCP server launches, that server wouldn’t be able to ask every client developer to register either.

Until now, the answer for MCP was Dynamic Client Registration (DCR). But as implementation experiences has shown us over the last several months, DCR introduces a massive amount of complexity and risk for both sides.

The new MCP spec solves this by adopting Client ID Metadata Documents.

The OAuth Working Group adopted the Client ID Metadata Document spec in October after about a year of discussion, so it’s still relatively new. But seeing it land as the default mechanism in MCP is huge. Instead of the client registering with each authorization server, the client establishes its own identity with a URL it controls and uses the URL to identify itself during an OAuth flow.

From: Client Registration and Enterprise Management in the November … • Aaron Parecki.

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Most conversations about agentic commerce stay on the screen. A user asks an AI to find running shoes under $150, the system compares options, applies filters, and places the order. The implied endpoint is always the same: websites and apps get replaced by AI shopping assistants.

That framing misses where the most interesting change is already showing up. As agents take over more of the decision‑making upstream, physical stores quietly shift role. They become execution‑first stores: locations optimized to fulfill agent‑generated intent, not generate it.

In other words, the customer journey increasingly starts before the customer, and stores are where that precomputed intent gets turned into real‑world outcomes.

From: (20) The Agentic Commerce Frontier 📅 | April 27 – May 11 2026.

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Three men went on a violent robbery spree targeting cryptocurrency owners in San Francisco, San Jose, and Sunnyvale, according to the U.S. Attorney Northern District of California. They are accused of conspiring to rob victims by posing as delivery workers. One of the victims was forced at gunpoint to sign into his cryptocurrency accounts and transfer approximately $6.5 million to a wallet controlled by the co-conspirators.

From: Millions stolen from ‘terrorized’ cryptocurrency owners in Bay Area: Feds.

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HBO has been forced to warn Harry Potter cast members over the suspected theft of props from set, and microchip items including spell books, broomsticks, pumpkins and wands.

A spate of disappearing items — not thought to have been conjured away magically — have prompted HBO to begin using Muggle electronic techniques to ensure the movement of props can be tracked.

From: Harry Potter TV Series Forced to Microchip Broomsticks Following Set Thefts.

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Cards dominate the business of making payments, and it’s not even close by number of transactions. By volume the biggest player is the Automated Clearing House (ACH), thanks to mortgages and business-to-business payments, which is also dominated by the largest banks. Other payment methods are either used at homeopathic levels (cryptocurrency, FedNow) or simply piggyback on the existing payment rails (ApplePay, Venmo). There’s simply no way around the card-based and ACH systems in the modern economy, with former essential for daily transactions.

From: The Money Monopoly in the 21st Century – The Sling.

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Coinbase, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, experienced a major service outage lasting more than two hours on May 8, 2026, directly linked to an underlying disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS). The outage originated in AWS’s US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia, in a single availability zone (use1-az4), after a thermal event caused a power loss that damaged hardware.

The disruption hit the same day Coinbase reported Q1 2026 earnings — including a $394 million GAAP net loss and a 14% workforce reduction tied to its AI-native operational restructuring.

From: Coinbase Down Due to AWS Outage — Same Day It Announced Q1 Results.

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Alongside our active involvement, we believe banks will ultimately play an important role in abstracting complexity from clients – ensuring that, depending on the nature of each transaction, the most appropriate form of digital money is used, whether a stablecoin, a tokenised deposit or a CBDC.

From: Digital Money – a perspective on stablecoins, tokenised deposits, and CBDCs – Deutsche Bank.

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