Snippings

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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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Stablecoin platform Circle is working with Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale and Santander to build a cross-border payment network to rival Swift.

From: Circle lines up banking partners for stablecoin-based Swift competitor.

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When your agent says: “Find me a hotel in Paris under $400 with a view of the Eiffel Tower,” it doesn’t just shoot off a search query. It packages that request with:

Your verified identity (e.g., from your digital wallet)
Preferences pulled from past trips
Payment credentials (tokenized)
Constraints like price cap, dates, loyalty programs
This is the structured context payload, and it’s sent to the travel site’s MCP client.

From: The End of Clicks: When AI Agents Become Your Customers (Part 2).

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Federal Reserve Governor Michael Barr recently said that in the face of increasing AI-based deepfake attacks, banks must “fight fire with fire” and invest more in artificial intelligence themselves. I disagree. That is a red queen’s race. Banks must evolve their use of digital identity to thwart deepfake attacks.

Deepfakes are becoming pervasive, and not only in banking. The owner of a London art gallery lost £30,000 after spending months negotiating an exhibition with a fake Pierce Brosnan. In another UK case, a woman was arrested after allegedly dressing up in a series of wigs and disguises to take citizenship tests on behalf of at least 14 other people, both make and female, using “doctored ID documents” to evade detection. The owner of an AirBnB property rented it out to a woman who had a stolen identity and passed the reference report with a forged driver’s licence: she then stole the furniture and sublet the house as a party pad.

(This sort of nonsense goes on all the time. Showing a fake driving licence to someone who has no idea how to check whether a driving licence is real or not is a form of security theatre, not actual security.)

 

 

It is possible that the use of facial recognition, voice analysis and behavioral biometrics will be able to detect AI fakes, until those fakes get better. And it may well be that significant investments in AI may help to defend banks against a tsunami of AI fraud, but that may be a temporary relief as the fraudsters up their game. But why go down this road? Instead of trying to out-AI the attackers, why not use a tried and tested technology that cannot be faked: digital signatures.

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The plot, which is currently active, bears a passing resemblance to OneCoin – a fake cryptocurrency launched in Germany that turned out to be a giant Ponzi scheme.

However, this is thought to be the first time experts have observed the launch of a genuine digital coin by a British street gang.

From: UK drug dealers create their own cryptocurrency to launder dirty money: How street-level crime gang developed new coin in first case of its kind in Britain.

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s volatile economic policies have tanked the dollar and thrown its status as the world’s reserve currency into question. The euro is poised to take advantage. Uncertainty over the transatlantic alliance may finally remove the political obstacles to the all-important creation of a euro zone safe asset to rival U.S. Treasury bonds.

From: Breaking News Headlines | Latest Views | Reuters.

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This relative underperformance is explained above all by the third test that a global currency must fulfil – and the fact that on it the Eurozone unfortunately falls down flat. This is the existence of a euro-denominated ‘safe asset’ to compete with US Treasury bonds. Such an ultimate safe haven security is the most fundamental building-block of a modern financial system – the collateral for repurchase and derivative contracts, the pricing benchmark for all other asset markets, and the basic savings instrument for domestic and foreign investors alike. Without a like-for-like Eurozone substitute for the US Treasury market, the euro simply isn’t at the races.

 

That fact is not lost on policy-makers. In 2011, the European Commission (EC) floated the idea of joint and severally guaranteed Stability Bonds which Eurozone members would be able to issue in an amount up to 60 per cent of their Gross Domestic Product. The European Systemic Risk Board proposed an alternative plan in 2018 for European Sovereign-Backed securities (“ESBies”), securitised pools of existing national government bonds, tranched into safer and riskier lines. In 2021, the EC even issued EUR750 billion programme of joint bonds to finance its post-Covid NextGenerationEU Recovery and Resilience Facility – though as a strictly time-limited experiment only.

 

The obstacle to the creation of a Eurozone safe asset, however, has always been political rather than technical. Bluntly, the more fiscally conservative Eurozone members have never accepted the principle of joint liability for Eurozone public debt. Yet in the era of America First, maybe even that shibboleth will fall.

 

Canada shows how fast public attitudes can change. President Trump’s economic and diplomatic blitzkrieg has just produced one of the biggest turn-arounds in recent political history. At a stroke, it transformed the incumbent Liberal party’s trenchant multilateralism from its Achilles’ heel to its strongest selling point, and turned a giant polling deficit into a narrow lead going into next Monday’s General Election.

 

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Likewise in the Eurozone, the prospect of further financial integration appeared vanishingly slight just a few short weeks ago. Yet with the greatest threat to incumbent parties in both France and Germany coming from the Trump-adjacent nationalist right, the heightened transatlantic tensions may prove a political gift to the dream of a truly global euro.

 

After all, what self-respecting patriot would now dare to oppose the project that, more than any other, will finally put Europe First?