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Machine-to-machine payments
in the AiFi era
The internet is acquiring a second customer: software that retrieves, compares, and increasingly transacts on a person’s behalf. These agents do not watch ads and may have no billing relationship with the services they use. As AI systems crawl to answer rather than to refer, the bargain that financed the open web is breaking down. Publishers, developers, and data providers need a way to charge for each use, including transactions worth a fraction of a cent. This paper explains why legacy payment rails struggle to serve that market economically, why stablecoins on low-cost networks are the strongest fit available today, and how policymakers can help agentic commerce develop on open, interoperable standards rather than inside proprietary marketplaces.
October 7, 2026
Read time: 3 min (executive summary) - 35 min (whole document)
Machine-to-machine payments in the AiFi era
The internet is acquiring a second customer: software that retrieves, compares, and increasingly transacts on a person’s behalf. These agents do not watch ads and may have no billing relationship with the services they use. As AI systems crawl to answer rather than to refer, the bargain that financed the open web is breaking down. Publishers, developers, and data providers need a way to charge for each use, including transactions worth a fraction of a cent. This paper explains why legacy payment rails struggle to serve that market economically, why stablecoins on low-cost networks are the strongest fit available today, and how policymakers can help agentic commerce develop on open, interoperable standards rather than inside proprietary marketplaces.
The Digital Product Passport and Blockchain Technology
The European Union’s Digital Product Passport (DPP) is a mandatory data initiative under the European Green Deal aimed at tracking product provenance, material composition, and sustainability metrics to meet climate goals. To address the architectural challenge of maintaining trustworthy, interoperable data across complex and fragmented global supply chains, blockchain technology serves as a critical, decentralized substrate. By utilizing decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials, and zero-knowledge proofs, blockchain-based DPPs create a tamper-evident record that allows stakeholders—from manufacturers to regulators—to verify essential product data without exposing sensitive commercial information. With multiple industry pilots already demonstrating scalability and effectiveness, blockchain offers a robust path toward the transparency and circularity required by upcoming EU regulations.
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Users in four states have missed out on an estimated $100M+ in less than two years
Regulators in California, New Jersey, Maryland, and Wisconsin issued misguided cease-and-desist orders in June 2023 prohibiting Coinbase users from staking additional assets. Coinbase is permitted to offer its staking services in nearly every other state. Users in these four states should be permitted to stake, too.
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