Agreeing with your immediate hunch that the traditional rails are sufficient for agentic commerce, but still finding the x402/stablecoin etc work fascinating:
Under which circumstances are the traditional rails actually off limits? Some (trivial) speculation being:
- When the beneficiary is not a traditional business but itself some sort of protocol / contract (that benefits from or even requires final settlement into eg. a stablecoin wallet, eg. to pipe those funds into downstream dependencies) - nothing with mainstream PMF here yet, but feels like the "trivial" case for those rails
- In cases where "broad commercial relationships" around low-cost txns aren't feasible -> credit risk can't be pooled, there isn't credit infra, etc -> market never clears. Global micro-payments to regions with no local acquiring/robust banking? Something else?
(yes, very guilty of solution in search of a problem thinking :))
Under which circumstances are the traditional rails actually off limits? Some (trivial) speculation being:
- When the beneficiary is not a traditional business but itself some sort of protocol / contract (that benefits from or even requires final settlement into eg. a stablecoin wallet, eg. to pipe those funds into downstream dependencies) - nothing with mainstream PMF here yet, but feels like the "trivial" case for those rails
- In cases where "broad commercial relationships" around low-cost txns aren't feasible -> credit risk can't be pooled, there isn't credit infra, etc -> market never clears. Global micro-payments to regions with no local acquiring/robust banking? Something else?
(yes, very guilty of solution in search of a problem thinking :))