Snippings

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Morgan Stanley estimates nearly half of online shoppers will delegate purchasing to AI agents by 2030.
Forward look: Managing identity, authorization, fraud risk and liability is of paramount importance for agentic commerce to be adopted broadly. But the emphasis should fall on identity. Everything else depends on it.
Recently, American Express CEO Stephen Squeri published a shareholder letter built entirely around the premise that AI agents transacting on behalf of consumers and businesses represent the most significant change in commerce since the rise of e-commerce. He identified the challenges that must be solved: identity, authorization, fraud risk and liability.

From: Banks need to be at the table in debates over AI agent identification | American Banker.

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Digital public infrastructure is now a nation-building question for Canada

From: Digital public infrastructure is now a nation-building question for Canada – The Hill Times – The Hill Times.

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An ASOS tycoon who plunged to his death from an apartment in Thailand has reportedly had nearly $4million taken from his Bitcoin wallet since he died.

From: $4million in Bitcoin ‘was transferred from ASOS co-founder’s account in the days following his death’ | Daily Mail Online.

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Digital ID is officially accepted as an approved age verification method for Apple Accounts and Apple services.

From: Apple Wallet’s new Digital ID feature just added more ways to use it – 9to5Mac.

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But the real power of agents comes when they can work as a team. Instead of lone-wolf bots carrying out single tasks, such as using a browser to make a restaurant reservation or sending you a summary of your inbox, new tools can yoke together multiple agents, give each of them a different job, and orchestrate their behaviors so that they all pull together to complete more complex tasks than an individual agent could do by itself.

From: Agent orchestration: 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now | MIT Technology Review.

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This anti-AI movement is taking shape around the world. In February, hundreds of people marched past the London headquarters of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta in one of the largest protests against AI to date. And in the US in March, an unlikely coalition of MAGA Republicans, democratic socialists, labor activists, and church leaders signed a Pro-Human AI Declaration, articulating the principle that AI should serve humanity, not replace it.

From: Resistance: 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now | MIT Technology Review.

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Gannon Ken Van Dyke appeared in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday after prosecutors said he made more than $400,000 from trading on the basis of classified information about the timing of the US military operation.

Van Dyke, an active-duty soldier at a military base in North Carolina, allegedly made roughly 13 bets on positions, including “US Forces in Venezuela” and “Maduro out” by certain dates, while he had access to classified information.

The 38-year-old is charged with the unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of non-public government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud and “engaging in a monetary transaction in property derived from specified unlawful activity”.

From: US soldier pleads not guilty over prediction trades on Maduro capture.

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In an interesting discussion on a Coindesk podcast “Why stablecoins are the gateway to tokenising everything” the new CMO of Stellar Development Foundation, Jason Karsh, talked about the long game in the cryptocurrency world. Apart from a variety of other useful observations he said that “we think that there will be more transactions between agents than between humans very quickly”.

I’m pretty sure that he is right on both counts. For a typcial commercial bank, stablecoins as a means of payment may well be uninteresting. But that is no reason to set aside stablecoins, because in these two other roles (laying down the rails for digital asset tokens of all kinds and providing a means of exchange for the agentic economy) they are central to next-generation financial market strategies.

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The counterparties who bought the “normal” outcome paid, on-chain, for a weather event that did not happen. The protocol worked perfectly. The problem was that the protocol was pointed at a thermometer you could warm up with a blowdryer.

From: $34 Dryer In Paris Wins $34000 On Polymarket | by Mandar Karhade, MD. PhD. | Apr, 2026 | Medium.

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I can’t stop thinking about prediction markets. Not only the shenanigans about blatant insider trading around governt men

TLDR
A bettor physically heated a Météo France sensor at Charles de Gaulle to win $34,000 on Polymarket.
Two hits. April 6 and April 15. Both markets resolved cleanly on-chain.
The “oracle” was one unguarded thermometer by a runway fence.
Polymarket’s response: switch airports. No refunds.
Smart contracts don’t care if the weather is real.

From: $34 Dryer In Paris Wins $34000 On Polymarket | by Mandar Karhade, MD. PhD. | Apr, 2026 | Medium.

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The counterparties who bought the “normal” outcome paid, on-chain, for a weather event that did not happen. The protocol worked perfectly. The problem was that the protocol was pointed at a thermometer you could warm up with a blowdryer.

From: $34 Dryer In Paris Wins $34000 On Polymarket | by Mandar Karhade, MD. PhD. | Apr, 2026 | Medium.

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Three accounts on Polymarket earned more than $600,000 by correctly betting on a U.S.-Iran cease-fire, weeks after they made an earlier round of profitable wagers on the U.S. attacking Iran, according to blockchain research firm Bubblemaps.

From: Trio of Polymarket Accounts Made $600,000 Betting on Iran Cease-Fire.

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On Polymarket, the Journal found, 67% of profits go to just 0.1% of accounts. That means less than 2,000 accounts netted a total of nearly half a billion dollars.

From: Why Almost Everyone Loses—Except a Few Sharks—on Prediction Markets – WSJ.

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(By the way, I stole the title of the post from the brilliant Jamie Bartlett. If you haven’t been listening to his BBC podcast series “Nothing is real and nobody cares” you should do yoursself a favour and subscribe immediate.)