Snippings

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De Nederlandsche Bank will sign a major contract tomorrow with Schwarz Digits, the IT arm of Lidl owner Schwarz Group. DNB aims to reduce its dependence on American cloud companies.

From: Dutch central bank chooses Lidl for European Cloud – Techzine Global.

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The federal government announced it’s planning to ban crypto ATMs in order to protect Canadians from scammers using the machines to defraud victims.

The Liberals’ spring economic update on Tuesday referred to crypto ATMs as a “primary method for scammers to defraud victims and for criminals to place their cash proceeds of crime.”

From: Federal government plans to ban crypto ATMs to stop scammers from defrauding Canadians | CBC News.

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Note that last number. As Jasmine Sun, an anthropologist who is one of the sharpest observers of the tech industry, puts it : “Most people don’t know anyone working at an AI company or on AI governance; they have no real agency to shape the trajectory of the tech. Talk of aggregate consumer surplus is scarce solace to an illustrator or cab driver losing their job. When people feel disempowered, they grasp at whatever leverage they can get.”

From: Tech bros, beware: resistance to AI moves from theory to ….

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Financial regulation has always been shaped by the boundaries it seeks to defend. Once, those boundaries were physical—bank branches, vaults, national borders. Then they became digital, defined by networks, firewalls, and systems.

Today, those perimeters are dissolving. In their place, a new focal point is emerging: identity. As financial services fragment across platforms, jurisdictions and technologies, the question is no longer just where risk resides, but who carries it. Increasingly, regulation is following that shift—reorienting itself around identity as the most persistent, portable, and contested layer in the system.

From: Is identity becoming the new perimeter of financial regulation? – RegTech100.

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They specialise in “trend simulation” — creating hundreds of posts, with tracks by their clients playing in the background, to manufacture the feeling that a song is everywhere.

From: Has taste in music been hijacked?.

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Target updated its terms and conditions on March 22 as it prepares to launch a partnership with AI bot Google Gemini. The integration could enable the AI to suggest products and complete purchases on a shopper’s behalf. The agent would not be able to buy products without the shopper’s approval.

The new terms and conditions say that if a customer authorizes an AI shopping agent to act on their behalf, those purchases and transactions would be “considered transactions authorized by you.”

In other words, the customer would still have to pay, even if, let’s say, the bot ordered the wrong item.

From: Target Updates Terms for Google Gemini AI Shopping Integration – Business Insider.

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X Money is not the end state, it’s the foundation for building a Retail Media network where their proprietary cobranded payment token replaces Google cookies & The Trade Desk UIDs for promotional attribution, shifting ~$1.2T in global promo spend toward pay-for-performance Cost per Action CPA economics tied to verified intent & outcome.

From: Feed | LinkedIn.

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Now layer in Agentic Payments:

• Autonomous account opening in nanoseconds
• Multi-account optimization across ~6–8 funding sources like PayPal
• Real-time tender steering based on rewards, credit availability & cost

From: Feed | LinkedIn.

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“A new challenge emerging in agentic commerce could be described as ‘Know Your Agent,’” Dimitropoulos told InvestorDaily. “This means ensuring that autonomous systems have the right permissions, can be audited, and are linked to verified users.”

From: Why stablecoins could rule the agentic commerce revolution – Investor Daily.

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The challenge becomes even more visible when looking at the European Commission’s new Apply AI Strategy, which aims to accelerate AI’s deployment and adoption across Europe’s economy and public sector. As various initiatives encourage the development of increasingly autonomous systems, the number of interactions between software agents, services and physical infrastructure will only grow. Ensuring these interactions remain attributable and verifiable becomes essential for maintaining trust in increasingly automated environments.

On the longer horizon, the inability to reliably attribute and verify autonomous agents’ actions in digital environments will also directly impact democratic cohesion and content moderation. Without ways to identify origin and authority, coordinated manipulation and even interference becomes difficult to detect and contest, and individuals may not be able to verify information presented to them or challenge automated decisions.

That’s why we need new layers of digital trust infrastructure capable of binding actions to identifiable actors and linking events to verifiable context. This means cryptographically anchored identities for AI agents, secure protocols governing interactions between humans and agents, and mechanisms capable of certifying real-world context.

Without these mechanisms, the agentic internet (an emerging part of the internet where AI agents act on users’ behalf) could evolve into an environment where impersonation, unverifiable automation and synthetic evidence become structurally indistinguishable from legitimate actions.

Europe must design and deploy a digital identity infrastructure for AI agents, where they can appear and operate within digital interactions as both identifiable and verifiable actors.

From: AI agents cannot be governed without their own digital identity – CEPS.

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