Snippings

In one of the recent reports, McKinsey said that what they label “credentialling and identity” is the first of their key control points in the agentic economy becaue agents need secure, user-granted permission before they can initiate transactions across multiple institutions. Therefore, as they point out, organisations that already manage high-trust credentials start with a clear advantage. They go on to highlight some success factors: zero-trust architectures that never assume persistent access, dynamic consent via standardized protocols (for example, OAuth2/OpenID Connect) and continuous audit trails.

I agree with their emphasis, of course. In facr, I have just co-authored a paper on Know-Your-Agent (KYA) with Jelena Hoffart of Mastercard. The paper is called “Know your agent: Enabling autonomous financial services” and it is published in the Journal of Digital Banking, Volume 10, Number 2, pages 123-134 (Autumn/Fall 2025), and it explores the identification, authentication and authorisation of non-human customers. This is a topic that is both central to the evolution of the online economy and intellectually fascinating, which is why I spend so much time looking at strategies in the field.

If I want to grant my agent Dave1A permission to go and book flghts on British Airways and book hotels on Hilton, then British Airways and Hilton need Dave1A to present a credential that says that the agent is allowed to book on my behalf together with my loyalty identifiers and maybe some other attributes.

Persona, the verified identify platform used by a host of fintechs (including Robinhood, Brex and OpenAI) has raised $200 million at a $2 billion valuation. The company says that rise of AI agents, increasingly sophisticated AI-driven fraud, regulatory fragmentation, and growing privacy expectations have created a far more complex — and constantly evolving — identity landscape. As Rick Song, CEO of Persona, puts it “Identity in an AI-driven world isn’t about ticking a box, and the question is no longer ‘is this a bot or not?’ but rather ‘who is the bot acting on behalf of, and what is their intent?

 

 

OK, I think that is straightforward and it is already clear that agentic commerce will be enabled by standard verifiable credentials (VCs) of one form of another, we do not need to speculate about that. But it is of course interesting to speculate on who will define what such credentials might look like and the framework in which they will work. Mastercard and Visa are obvious players in that space, but it is early days.

 

This was one of the topics discussed at Checkout.com’s recent conference in Venice, where they announced a pilot with a major UK retailer to place orders via Microsoft Co-Pilot but as Geoffrey Barraclough highlighted in his report on the event, the big question isn’t how this technology will actually work but who will pay who and how the rewards and liabilities will be shared between merchants and agents, platform and payments processor.

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It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI.

From: Have we passed peak social media?.

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In years to come, we may well look back on September 2025 as the point at which social media jumped the shark and began rapidly accelerating its transition from the place to be seen (through a flattering Instagram filter), to a gaudy backwater of the internet inhabited by those with nothing better to do.

From: Have we passed peak social media?.

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Well, what do you know, Tether has announced that Rumble will be a key launch platform for its planned US stablecoin USAT. It most likely won’t end up being the only one, but it’s an intriguing partnership for both Tether and Rumble.

From: Tether+Rumble, stablecoins as money – by Noelle Acheson.

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BBVA customers in Spain with an iPhone 15 Pro or a newer model can head to the cards section in their banking app, select the Visa card they want to personalise, and either use one of their own images as a base or describe the image they want to create.

Apple Intelligence’s Image Playground will then generate several proposals, and the design chosen by the customer will be instantly updated in the BBVA app wallet.

Initially, the feature is only available for virtual cards but customers will soon be able to design physical cards and have them delivered to their home.

From: BBVA lets customers use Apple AI to create their own card designs.

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The system does not have to be organised like this. It is possible, at least partially, to separate money from credit provision, with banks and stablecoins coexisting and non-banks carrying out more of the credit provision role.

From: The new stablecoin regime.

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Mandel remains enchanted by space but is skeptical that humans are the optimal trailblazers. Robots, rovers, probes, and other artificial space ambassadors could do the job for a fraction of the price and without risk to life, limb, and other corporeal vulnerabilities.

“A decentralization of self needs to occur,” she writes. “A dissolution of anthropocentrism, so to speak. And a recognition that future space explorers may not be man, even if man moves through them.”

From: The case against humans in space | MIT Technology Review.

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in a court filing from last week, Google admitted that “the open web is already in rapid decline,”

From: Google admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline’ | The Verge.

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In that court filing Google said that:

“The fact is that today, the open web is already in rapid decline and Plaintiffs’ divestiture proposal would only accelerate that decline, harming publishers who currently rely on open-web display advertising revenue.”

The people who run Google are not stupid, and they have seen what the transition to the post-web (that is, the web but for AI agents, not for people) will mean.

Is it time to start thinking about micropayments again? In particular, since most everything on the post-web will be produced by AI and since most everything on the post-web will be consumed by AI, is time to start thinking about AI-AI micropayments? 

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I’m not the only person who was wondering about this. The noted venture capitalist Marc Andreessen knows more about the web than I ever will, and back in 2012 he told a Wired magazine conference in New York that “we should have built payments in the browser”.

(They got half way, because buried in your browser, in addition to the familiar error 404 for page-not-found, there is also error 402 for page-requires-payment. But no payment mechanism was provided.)

I note that the Collisons (the genius brothers behind Stripe) were also quoted arguing that the lack of effective payments mechanism is the reason that the web went from being an open environment and opportunity for all to an “oligopoly controlled by five companies now worth more than $3 trillion”.

From: Micropayments Are A Macro Opportunity.

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“When Berners-Lee and his team were building the world wide web and designing HTTP and HTMP standards, they included error codes such as ‘500: internal server error’, or ‘404: page not found’. In the early 90s, they were trying to realise Licklider’s vision and setting out the rules for how we were all going to interact over this information network. One long-standing error code is ‘402: payment required’. The original intention – the reason 402 is reserved for future use – was that this code would be used to transact digital cash or micropayments. It has never been implemented – and the Collisons argue this is the reason tech is turning from an equal access opportunity to an oligopoly controlled by five companies now worth more than $3 trillion.”

From “The untold story of Stripe, the secretive $20bn startup driving Apple, Amazon and Facebook | WIRED UK”.

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In Micropayments and Mental Transaction Costs, Nick Szabo pinpointed a truth that technologists often overlooked: while computational costs (like processing payments, preventing fraud, or validating cryptography) can be driven down, the mental overhead of deciding, monitoring, or worrying about every tiny expense remains stubbornly high.

From: Szabo’s Micropayments and Mental Transaction Costs: 25 Years Later – Bitcoin Magazine – Bitcoin News, Articles and Expert Insights.

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This is why I was so interested to see that Louis Amira, Stripe’s former head of crypto & AI partnerships, and David Noel-Romas, Stripe’s former head of crypto engineering, have raised $19 million in seed funding for their new venture Circuit & Chisel. They are launching ATXP, a new protocol that enables AI agents to handle the commerce lifecycle (from discovery to payment) autonomously. The protocol, which be compatible with other new developments in the space such as Coinbase’s X.402 protocol. What particularly caught my eye was their intention for ATXP to enable low cost micropayments that are initiated, negotiated and executed entirely by agents.

 

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Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz said that AI agents will soon become the top users of stablecoins.

During an interview with Bloomberg published on Wednesday, Novogratz said that “in the not-so-distant future, the biggest user of stablecoins is going to be AI.”

From: AI Agents to be top stablecoin users: Galaxy’s Novogratz.

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The biggest US-listed companies keep talking about artificial intelligence. But other than the “fear of missing out”, few appear to be able to describe how the technology is changing their businesses for the better.

From: America’s top companies keep talking about AI — but can’t explain the upsides.

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Ultimately the degree of trust we give to our prime AI agent — the one we interact with all day every day — will be a score that is boasted about, contested, shared, and advertised widely. In other domains, like a car or a phone, we take reliability for granted.

AI is so much more complex and personal, unlike other products and services in our lives today,

the trustworthiness of AI agents will be crucial and an ongoing concern. Its trust quotient (TQ) may be more important than its intelligence quotient (IQ). Picking and retaining agents with high TQ will be very much like hiring and keeping key human employees.

From: The Technium: The Trust Quotient (TQ).

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