I think the business model will be the same - standardize the abundant and build network effects on the scarcity; what’s changing is what’s abundant vs scarce;
Agents make execution abundant. on-chain settlement cost is trending to zero; then what’s left that’s still scarce in the blockchain context is liquidity.
But it’s not just trading or lending liquidity. Agents make execution abundant across all possible use cases; therefore the form of liquidity that’ll be needed is all possible form of capabilities supply - in other words, other agents.
@robbiepetersen_ If the agentic economy will look more like an org chart than a marketplace, then what needs to be built is more of a top-down control structure as delegation substrate, instead of an open coordination market.
> I think that agentic payments are the killer app state channels never had.
👍👍👍
off-chain replicated state machines with superseding signed state that use blockchain for escrow and settlement.
They’ll come for payments, and stay for programmable coordination.
Claude code re-discovered Unix, and taught us that powerful coordination doesn’t require rich, bespoke standards, but a small set of simple and universal primitives:
- cli powers everything
- everthing is a file
- every task is pipe-able
Simple interfaces win. Unix won. Git won. HTTP won. REST won.
But almost all current agent protocols are designed like ESB and CORBA.
It gets worse for agentic payment, commerce or transaction standards. They won’t work, not because agents don’t need standards, but because they’re trying to standardize the wrong layer. We keep trying to standardize rich semantics, shared ontologies, negotiation flows, and high-level message schemas. That is exactly where heterogeneity is highest and agreement is hardest.
Unix did not win by standardizing meaning. It won by standardizing composition.
Don’t standardize what agents think. Standardize how value moves when they agree.
💡Patrick Young @patkyoung — Head of Growth, Khalani @khalani_network
"Agentic payments need bulletproof execution rails." 🤖
• The bottleneck isn’t AI intelligence — it’s coordination, verification, and deterministic settlement.
• Without trust-minimized execution, AI is just another API.
• Agents need escrowed capital, solver accountability, and protocol-level guarantees.
• The real blocker today? Fragmented chains, liquidity, and execution venues.
• Autonomous agents require unified intent routing + cross-chain liquidity.
The future isn’t on-chain AI.
It’s verifiable, economically-enforced execution.
Panel Highlight | How AI Becomes Trust-Minimized at Scale
Hosted by @499_DAO × @0G_labs × @hetu_protocol
At The Scaling Summit @ ETHDenver, leaders:
Michael Dressler @mdressler24 — Head of Success, 0G @0G_labs
Patrick Young @patkyoung — Head of Growth, Khalani @khalani_network
Michael Berman @mikebermantoo — Co-CEO, Tectonic Labs @tectonicxyz
Vinay Kumar — Co-Founder, Flashback Labs @FlashbackLabs
Explored what it really takes for AI-native infrastructure to become composable, verifiable, and production-ready.
AI doesn’t fail because of model capability.
It fails when execution and settlement aren’t trust-minimized.
#TheScalingSummit #AIInfrastructure #DeAI #Web3AI #ETHDenver
Watch the discussion ↓
You need an open p2p market where the on/off ramp order settlement conditions are programmable without having to deploy bespoke contracts for each bank / zkTLS vendor, data schema etc
AI can help write per vendor/bank zkTLS plumbing and proof generation code but is not the key unlock for generalizing this
@8004_scan Agents are just code - they could have identity but how do you ensure the code hasn’t changed?
On the agent side, does slight change of code require rebuilding reputation from scratch?
@cyntro_py agents can't get API keys. APIs are the not the right primitive, intents are.
Intents are APIs with inverse integration semantics: not demand integrating supply, but supply integrating demand.
Privacy will be the most important moat in crypto.
Why? Because secrets are hard to migrate.
Everyone is launching a new "high performance" blockchain lately. But these chains are hardly different from one another. Blockspace is functionally the same everywhere. And with bridges that make moving between chains easy, that blockspace is now accessible *from* everywhere. Mercenary users and capital quickly arriving on a chain to farm an airdrop can leave just as quickly to farm the next one on another chain.
The reality is that if your "general purpose" chain doesn't already have a thriving ecosystem, a killer application, or an unfair distribution advantage, there's very little reason for anyone to use it or build on top of it. Performance alone is no longer enough.
Privacy is the one feature that everyone agrees is critical for the world’s finance to move onchain. It’s also the one feature that almost every blockchain that exists today completely lacks. For most chains, it has been little more than an afterthought until now.
Privacy by itself is sufficiently compelling to differentiate a new chain from all the rest. But it also does something more important: it creates chain lock-in.
Bridging tokens is easy, but bridging secrets is hard.
As long as everything is public, it's trivial to move from one chain to another, thanks to bridging protocols like LayerZero. But, as soon as you make things private, that is no longer true. There is always a risk when moving in or out of a private zone that people who are watching the chain, mempool, or network traffic will be able to figure out who you are. Crossing the boundary between a private chain and a public one—or even between two private chains—leaks all kinds of metadata like transaction timing and size correlations that makes it easier to track you.
Compared to the many undifferentiated new chains whose fees will likely be driven down to zero by competition, blockchains with privacy have a much stronger network effect. When you're on public blockchains, it's easy to transact with users on other chains—it doesn't matter which chain you join. When you're on private blockchains, on the other hand, the chain you choose matters much more because, once you join one, you're less likely to move and risk being exposed.
This will create a winner-take-most dynamic. And because privacy is essential for most real-world use cases, a handful of privacy chains will own most of crypto.
@0xMasonH not just agentic actions to consume service, but to provide service given working capital; agents write code to glue together existing services