Author: Robbie Petersen, Dragonfly Junior Partner

Translated by: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher

Whenever a new narrative enters public discussion, mainstream arguments are simplified into forms that are most easily accepted by the public. Intuitively, when no one can empirically prove what will happen, provocation tends to yield greater returns than meticulous analysis.

The recent discussions around "agent commerce" are no exception. There is a market consensus forming: the number of agents is surging; agents need to transact; agents cannot hold bank accounts but can hold digital wallets; card organizations charge 2-3% fees; therefore, stablecoins will prevail.

This chain of logic is flawed on many levels. Agents can hold bank accounts within an FBO (Financial Operator) framework. Moreover, the 2-3% fees reflect credit risk and fraud risk, which blockchain does not solve.

However, the debate about "which payment method will prevail?" actually stems from a premise that is largely overlooked in discussions:

Will most agents really transact?

The scale of the agent economy will be massive, but the proportion of agents actually transacting will not be that high.

The agent economy resembles an organizational chart, not a market

Fundamentally, artificial intelligence is an automation technology. It can perform certain tasks—such as searching, aggregating, and synthesizing—more efficiently than humans. Agents are the operational derivatives of artificial intelligence. They do not merely return output results; they perform actual actions.

The entire theory of agent commerce implies the assumption that: performing tasks incurs costs. In other words, for most agent tasks, they need to spend funds to autonomously acquire external resources, pay for computing and data costs on a usage basis, and interact with other agents as independent economic entities.

This presents a fundamental contradiction with the actual application of agents.

Overall, the deployment of agents can be categorized into two types: business agents deployed on behalf of enterprises and consumer agents that enhance our personal lives. For different reasons, both types of agents are unlikely to transact autonomously.

Business agents are the inevitable evolution of SaaS

A reasonable concept of business agents is the inevitable evolution of SaaS. They do not enhance workflows but replace existing workflows. Just as over 95% of software spending comes from businesses and governments, over 95% of large-scale agent application scenarios are likely to be deployed within similar organizations.

This is the first subtlety overlooked by current mainstream agent business theories: the vast majority of agent demand does not stem from agents booking flights for consumers, but from top-down deployments within enterprises. More importantly, agents automating tasks within closed organizations are fundamentally different from agents operating as independent economic entities.

Take sales agents as an example. It connects to the CRM system, researches potential customers, writes personalized marketing copy, and arranges follow-ups. It does not spend autonomously nor interact with external agents from other organizations. It merely performs a task—sales outreach—within a closed environment and automates it.

Intuitively, this situation applies to nearly all organizational functions. Financial agents audit and check expenses; accounting agents record journal entries, reconcile accounts, and prepare reports; legal agents review contracts and identify exceptions; coding agents write code.

In nearly all use cases, agents themselves do not spend and are not endowed with spending authority. They are deployed from the top down in a controlled organizational environment and have permission control mechanisms in place.

Even if it does need to interact across organizations and pay for its API calls or data, the costs may not be reflected as payments made by the agent autonomously. Any usage-based costs could be abstracted by software vendors. This is precisely how enterprise software stacks operate. Platform providers negotiate customized partnerships with data providers, computing providers, and other infrastructure partners to bundle access into platform costs and present it as a single aggregated entry.

Additionally, they can achieve this with unit economics that no single agent could autonomously replicate. Computing resources are acquired through reserved capacity agreements with AWS, Azure, or GCP. Pricing for model inference is based on bulk agreements with companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google. Data enhancement is done through suppliers like Bombora or Clearbit. All of this is pre-negotiated and abstracted.

In other words, the 40,000 API calls, model inferences, and data queries made by an agent do not result in 40,000 individual payments, but generate a single invoice. The granularity of consumption has never been the same as the granularity of settlement, and enterprises are likely to prefer it that way.

Consumer agents will coordinate, not consume

While business agents may not transact autonomously because enterprises do not allow them to, consumer agents will also not transact autonomously because people do not want them to.

For example, a favorite cited by advocates of smart commerce: you have your agent book a trip to Tokyo. It will search hundreds of hotels, cross-reference reviews, check your calendar, and apply your preferences. Then, it will automatically book a room. You do not have to do anything. Of course, those advocating for agent-based business models will promote this user experience across almost all consumer domains, from groceries to home goods to clothing, and more.

The issue is that preferences are not static. They are expressed within the choice behavior itself. When you book a hotel, you are not just looking for the lowest-priced accommodation. The judgments you make reflect your mood, context, risk tolerance, and other qualitative factors that you may not have been consciously aware of before reviewing the options.

In practice, agents will search, ask follow-up questions, and return options. You will look at pictures, inquire about the surrounding environment, and possibly read some reviews. Then you will make a choice and authorize the agent to use its stored credit card information for payment. In other words, the agent is just a research assistant, not an independent economic entity.

Except for certain predictable repeat purchases, this user experience is likely to be consistent across almost all consumer domains precisely because consumer decisions rarely depend solely on price. The entire consumer economy is built on product differentiation. Whether it's clothing, hotels, home goods, or groceries, the decision-making process involves countless qualitative factors that not only cannot be captured by agents—but more importantly, these factors exist within the process of user discovery itself.

Agents will play a powerful coordinating role in the discovery phase, but at crucial moments, they will return decision-making power to humans. Semantically, this is not agent commerce, nor does it require the establishment of new payment channels.

The real advantage of crypto payments: bottom-up agents

While in the next five years, these two types of agents together might account for over 95% of agent deployments, there is a third category worth noting.

In recent months, a new type of bottom-up agent has begun to emerge. Driven by the OpenClaw phenomenon, these agents belong to a fundamentally different category. Unlike the aforementioned business and consumer agents, they are genuinely autonomous actors, independent of any organizational entity. These agents require actual payments, and the granularity and frequency of the payments make manual authorization impractical. Although the bottom-up agent economy is currently very small, it is likely to grow rapidly with the emergence of some unforeseen new use cases.

Therefore, only in this extremely narrow context does the debate about whether crypto payments or card networks represent the best underlying architecture become compelling. While many cite superior technical arguments for crypto payments, I believe the real reason for their eventual success may be something else—permissionless.

The current reality is that neither payment method has been technically optimized for agent commerce. While blockchain theoretically offers better unit economics for micro-payments, it lacks mechanisms for verification and risk scoring—critical factors that may be essential in the future agent era. Furthermore, although instant settlement is often mentioned, it merely means that fraudulent transactions are settled on-chain immediately. In contrast, card organizations have complex fraud mapping and tokenized credentials for agents to inherit, but these tools are trained based on human behavior patterns and cannot be directly mapped to autonomous agent transactions. Additionally, for cross-border transactions, agents will also be subject to the settlement times imposed by card organizations.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the reason crypto payment methods might become the default infrastructure for such agents is precisely because blockchain is open, permissionless, and unregulated.

This is its ultimate structural advantage. While I believe that existing card organizations like Visa and Mastercard will continue to adjust through initiatives like Visa Intelligence Commerce and Mastercard's AgentPay, they are still public companies that must comply with regulatory obligations, meet customer access requirements, and cooperate with institutional trading partners. Blockchain does not have these constraints. Anyone can develop on blockchain, any agent can transact, and there is no approval required.

Intuition tells us that emerging, experimental categories will grow in places with the least friction.

The bottleneck is not in the infrastructure, but in ourselves

However, the longer-term question is how this experimental development can ultimately create a bigger impact. The bottom-up agent economy will only become truly popular when autonomous agents inherently outperform human organizations enhanced by agents; this advantage must not be weak, but significant enough that top-down human restrictions on agents become a competitive disadvantage. At that point, agents will no longer just be automation executors of human tasks in closed environments, but will become the organization itself.

However, we may be far from that future. The bottleneck is not in the technology itself. In fact, what may truly be “unsuitable for machines” is not the payment systems themselves, but rather every other aspect that has not been designed for an autonomous agent economy: regulatory frameworks, institutional bureaucracies, legal structures, and the social inertia surrounding human decision-making. These constraints are far more impactful than any technical detail within the payment stack. Unfortunately, protocol upgrades will not resolve these issues.

The scale of the agent economy will be enormous, and much of it will be billed monthly.

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