Been seeing a lot of discourse on X about agents triggering a bank run/lowering bank NIM by sweeping non-interest bearing deposits into yield. I think this is possible but going to take a lot longer than people think:
1. Retail banking is one of the highest switching cost products and deeply concentrated. The top 5 banks hold roughly half of US consumer deposits and banks with over $10B in consumer deposits hold close to 85%. These banks are incentivized to not be accessible to agents and are already not developer friendly. We have seen this with the big banks pushing back on open banking by charging for data access and reducing what is available. Muse can read your balances via Plaid but cannot move the money.
2. Well over half of consumer deposits are held by households 55+. This cohort is less likely to be an early adopter of an AI finance tool not being endorsed or directly offered by their bank.
3. The top 10% of households by wealth hold approximately 60% of deposits (top 1% alone is nearly 25%). Most of this money already has an advisor or brokerage attached reducing the incremental value proposition of a standalone consumer agent. The bottom 50% hold 5.5% of deposits, so the mass market agent story is less existential to bank funding.
Net net, I think in the fullness of time agents do become the primary interface for personal finance and cheap deposits shrink over time. But most of that comes from AI democratizing access to services the wealthiest people already get, and it will be relatively slow because these tools are new and people will need to establish trust before having them manage their money.
If you're building / investing in consumer and spend all your time on X, you're in a bubble
The mainstream breakout trend of the past 6 months is not agents but...digital repacks of trading cards
Monthly U.S. consumer spend on Anthropic vs. @triumpharcade ๐
Since M0's onchain infrastructure launched in June 2024, we've processed over $61.1B in volume.
Businesses use M0 to build and operate 20+ onchain products and we're very thankful for our network of powerful and innovative builders.
Onward!
i asked opus 5.5 to make a 3 min video about the history of bitcoin
i told claude to rely on data from my local 1.8 tb postgres database of bitcoin data (coins, blocks, hacks, attribution, everything)
hereโs what opus made in 1 hour 22 mins on max effort with a 10 line prompt
there's a real dissonance in defi land right now.
onchain money was supposed to be the antidote to relinquishing control to monolithic institutions.
yet, we've handed control of the onchain money stack to...monolithic institutions ???
@AnthropicAI โOk Claude, please use our new wet lab to find a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Make no mistakesโฆand, ugh, make sure itโs safe.โ