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Wang ordered attorneys Christopher Kachouroff and Jennifer DeMaster to show cause as to why the court should not sanction the defendants, law firm, and individual attorneys. Kachouroff and DeMaster also have to explain why they should not be referred to disciplinary proceedings for violations of the rules of professional conduct.

Kachouroff and DeMaster, who are defending Lindell against a lawsuit filed by former Dominion Voting Systems employee Eric Coomer, both signed the February 25 brief with the defective citations. Kachouroff, representing defendants as lead counsel, admitted using AI to write the brief at an April 21 hearing, the judge wrote.

From: Mike Lindell’s lawyers used AI to write brief—judge finds nearly 30 mistakes – Ars Technica.

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When Congress exempted small banks from debit card swipe fee caps under the Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 it led to an unexpected outcome: a wave of partnerships between small banks and fintech companies because the smaller banks have more interchange revenue to share. Fintechs deserve credit for popularizing no-overdraft accounts and pressuring others to follow. On the other hand, their business model cuts costs by eliminating bank branches, which limits access for those without digital access.

From: How Fed debit card regs could drive debanking.

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“This is about much more than just getting your website indexed in their results. This is about recognising large language models as the ultimate influencer,” said Jack Smyth, partner at marketing technology group Brandtech, which has created its own interface for brands.

From: Brands target AI chatbots as users switch from Google search.

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Most predictions anticipated either an extremely bad or extremely good end-state. One common and more nuanced forecast was the desire to see LLMs move from advice and information to doing, i.e., agentic behavior. For example, one user wanted a model that would “cancel this subscription before they start charging me.”

From: How People Are Really Using Gen AI in 2025.

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e-IDAS2 provides legal acceptance for digital signing and Uses Advanced Electronic Signatures (AdES) [here]. AdES is defined as part of the EU Regulation No 910/2014 (eIDAS-regulation) and is used to provide electronic identification and for trusted services related to electronic transactions in the EU. e-ID uses a ledger based on EBSI (Electronic Blockchain Services Infrastructure) with a federated approach with each country running their own trust infrastructure (uses Hyperledger Fabric). Each country is responsible for registering entities with its digital wallet. EBSI will then hold the trusted public keys of entities. Overall, there are many application areas defined, including driving licences, travel documents, qualifications, and so on. It has a focus on \emph{Gather once, use many times approach}, and compliant wallets for organisations and individuals are being defined at \cite{europaConformantWallets}. Serbia aims to launch a digital wallet by the end of 2025 \cite{seenewsSerbiaLaunch}.

From: TSPs, e-ID, e-IDAS 2 and the UK Digital Wallet | by Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE | Apr, 2025 | Medium.

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And, so, it has been nearly 50 years since the creation of public key signing, but governments still do not see the true power of digital signing and the proper use of digital wallets. For a truly tokenised world, an entity will properly digitally sign for things with our private key, and verify with our public key — but we need a legal basis for this, and where the UK has failed to support any move towards this, and still stick with the wet signature and “copy and paste my signature into a Word document” approach to signing. We live in a false digital world!

From: TSPs, e-ID, e-IDAS 2 and the UK Digital Wallet | by Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE | Apr, 2025 | Medium.

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Value, Measurement, and Pricing Power

One of the more fascinating uncertainties is around pricing power in agentic markets. In traditional settings, value is signaled by price, negotiated by humans, and bounded by contracts. But what happens when agents act on your behalf with near-perfect knowledge and zero marginal cost to execute?

For merchants, pricing to agents rather than people will require a shift from human psychology to algorithmic decision-making. The power of bundling, nudges, and time-based scarcity may give way to real-time utility curves modeled by agents.
For platforms, control over the agent interface may confer disproportionate pricing power. Whoever interprets the consumer’s prompt, selects candidate providers, and controls the feedback loop effectively becomes the market maker.
For networks, particularly payments and identity providers, there’s a massive opportunity. Transactional friction is being redefined: the cost of trust, of authentication, and of dispute resolution. These soft functions—normally hidden behind the scenes—may become explicit agentic service layers with their own pricing dynamics.
Transaction Cost Economics Revisited

From: Commercial Models for AI Agents | Noyes Payments Blog.

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Unlike e-commerce, built on an internet that never had a security layer (so no digital money and no digital identity), a-commerce will be built on an infrastructure that delivers real security to market participants. Putting this secure infrastructure in place is a fantastic opportunity for fintechs and other startups who want to provide digital money and digital identity as core components. As the identification, authentication and authorisation mechanisms around MCP are standardised, there is no reason not expect the rapid acceleration of a-commerce across the mass market.

From: Why You Need To Know About The Model Context Protocol (MCP).

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A Harvard Business Review report published last week said ‘companionship and therapy’ is now the top use case for generative AI, replacing ‘idea generation’ from 2024. In fact, the top three use cases in the report fell under the personal and professional support category, including a brand new use case: ‘Finding purpose.’

From: Why AI is the New Social Media – by Alex Kantrowitz.

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A record 94.6% of all eligible in-store card transactions in the UK were made using contactless last year.

From: Contactless dominates UK spending.

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