Agent Payments Are About To Revolutionize Global Financial Infrastructure

By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

TL;DR:

When Coinbase acquired One River Digital nearly three years ago, I had to learn a new language. Pretty much every internal memo I received started with TL;DR which meant nothing to me. I would’ve asked ChatGPT but it didn’t yet exist. Google said it meant “too long; didn’t read”, which also made little sense. I guess it’s some kind of slang that precedes a short paragraph that summarizes a longer article you probably won’t read. I had to learn all sorts of other new things at Coinbase, some annoying, others eye-opening, fascinating, exhilarating. 

If you think you can make a lot of money without learning all sorts of new and perplexing things,here’s a helpful TL;DR: Think again. So, here’s an example of the kind of TL;DR that comes across my feed and gets me super excited. This from the Coinbase blog on Sept 16th. TL;DR: Agents can already talk to each other. And now, with x402 within Google’s new AP2, they can pay each other too. Stablecoins make this possible at the speed of code, unlocking micropayments and new models of automation that legacy rails simply can’t support.

25-year-old Coinbase engineers with IQ’s one order of magnitude higher than mine read that TL;DR and read no further. I need to dig deeper [read here]. I ask Grok to teach me all about the meaning of x402,its origin,and Google’s AP2. Each question leads to another. Eventually I wrap my head around it. So, here’s my TL;DR: Coinbase, Google and numerous others have teamed up to build payment rails that allow Autonomous AI Agents (Agents) to instantly transact at vast scale, without the need for banks, using stablecoins on blockchain rails. 

It doesn’t take a wild imagination to picture a world where AI Agents are acting on our behalf in ways that simplify our daily lives, and make the economy far more productive, efficient, prosperous. The scale of what is coming is far beyond the ability of banks and the incumbent payment infrastructure to handle. When I entered crypto 5yrs ago, blockchain infrastructure wouldn’t have been able to handle what is coming either. But if you squinted, you could see speeds rising, scale expanding, costs falling. That’s what an opportunity looks like. 

From the “didn’t read” body of the blogpost, this caught my eye: When Base launched, our priority was clear: To build a secure, low-cost, developer-friendly chain and ecosystem. This year, we’ve achieved our north star of sub-second, sub-cent transactions, and we’ve expanded beyond a chain into an open stack that makes it simple for anyone to build, trade, and earn onchain. Here’s my TL;DR: Blockchain transaction speeds (using Ethereum as the L1 and Base as the L2) have surged, costs collapsed. Expect valuable use cases to explode. 

It may not have been obvious 5yrs ago. But at this stage, with the convergence of regulatory clarity for dollar stablecoin (with more to come), scalable blockchain technology, and Autonomous AI Agents, it should be apparent that global financial infrastructure is about to undergo a once in a generation upgrade. The opportunities to build businesses and invest in the companies and tokens that will profit from this build-out should be enormous. This is the hand that we’ve been dealt. Learn the new languages required, ask a million questions, and take risk.