Agentic Commerce Everywhere

gm Bankless Nation,
Agents have been the only topic that matters in tech in 2026. They've also been a key shared surface area for AI and crypto bullishness.

In today's essay, David Hoffman makes the hard sell on agentic commerce for the non-believers and mild-believers.

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Agentic commerce. Agentic commerce. Agentic commerce. 

If you are interested in AI, crypto, and the economic topology of the internet, then this 2025 Ben Thompson article The Agentic Web and Original Sin should be required reading. 

The thesis of this article is highly topical to some pretty big Bankless podcast episodes we’ve done in the past:

1. Reinventing the Internet with Marc Andreessen

This is where Marc gives the idea of the “Original Sin of the Internet”, which was to not include a native payments system at genesis. As a result of that, the ad model of the internet took hold. Users became the product, content was free, and websites simply were a clearinghouse between users’ eyeballs and advertisers' products. 

2. How Crypto Fixes the Internet with Antonio García Martínez

Antonio argues something counter to Marc’s thesis – ads are good actually, and the ads actually fueled the growth of the internet by harmonizing the interests of the three relevant parties: Users, websites, and advertisers. 

Ben Thompson agrees with Antonio, and says Marc is too hard on himself. There was no intuitive way to integrate money into the internet before stablecoins. 

But now, in 2026, we have capable AI agents, stablecoins, and blockchains with enough bandwidth for microtransactions. Combined, these three technologies have the potential to reconstruct the internet as we know it today. 

How? First, if you’re keeping up with the frontier of AI technology, you should notice that your time spent on ChatGPT or Claude is replacing the time you spend “browsing the web.” AI is becoming the default interface for users on the internet. In addition to that, I also think that the visual form factor of ChatGPT and Claude basically looking like the now-archaic Google search bar will be viewed as skeuomorphic in the future. 

Our podcast with Illia Polosukhin will come out this week, where he’ll tell you...

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Enter the Rabbithole

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WHAT YOU MISSED

SEC Clarity

📈 The Asset

• ETH ETFs hold 5.1% of ETH supply
• Ultrasound.money reported 19k net ETH issuance this week
• Ethereum Foundation deposited 3.4k ETH into Morpho and received its first validator index assignment

🏛️ The Protocol

• All core devs discussed Glamsterdam upgrades in their latest call
• Lean Ethereum released fastconfirm.it, an info hub for the Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR)
• Ethereum is prioritizing hardening the L1
• Julian Ma explained single-slot confirmations

📱 The Apps

• Aave published a postmortem following a $50M swap for $36k of AAVE
• TheDAO Security Fund introduced ETHSecurity Badges, an onchain reputation system for security contributors
• Amundi & Spiko launched a tokenized sub-fund on Ethereum
• Codex introduced Codex FX, a stablecoin-powered FX platform
• DFS added support for Lazy Summer vaults
• ECF launched Swapboard, a bulletin board for P2P token trading
• Euclid went live on Arbitrum
• Fluid introduced its Lite USD Vault
• Mastercard is acquiring BVNK
• OpenSea delayed its token launch
• PayPal expanded PYUSD to 70 markets
• Polymarket acquired Brahma
• Privy launched Earn, which generates DeFi yield on idle Privy balances
• Status added support for the Ethereum Follow Protocol
• Tally is shutting down

🤫 The Privacy Stack

• Bungee launched Incognito on Base
• PSE released Social Recovery SDK
• EF Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF) released a DIY validium proof of concept
• PrivacyEthereum discussed post-quantum threats to Ethereum privacy
• soispoke shared a preview of private L1 swaps

🐸 The Culture

• Vitalik Buterin: “The importance of dynamic consensus” and “revisiting client separation”
• The SEC clarified that non-securities digital assets include digital commodities, collectibles, tools, and certain stablecoins

💽 The Tech

• Base is sunsetting OnchainKit
• Coinbase added ERC-20 support to x402
• Etherscan added support for viewing proxy contracts’ upgrade history
• EVM Chronicle added contract searches by pattern
• Sign in with Ethereum rewrote the UI for its Discourse plugin
• Tempo went live on mainnet
• Unichain integrated Chainlink’s data standard
• Visa released Visa CLI, which supports agentic crypto payments
• Wevm introduced mppx
• World adopted the ERC-8183 Agentic Commerce Standard and unveiled AgentKit

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WEEKLY ROLLUP

This Should Be Bullish... Right?

Ryan and David break down a historic week for crypto as the SEC and CFTC finally deliver long-awaited clarity, classifying major tokens and reshaping the market.

At the same time, Bitcoin is outperforming stocks and gold amid global tensions, raising the key question: is this a real regime shift or just a relief rally? They also cover the rise of prediction markets, the emerging battle for agentic payments (Tempo vs. Stripe/Coinbase), and crypto’s cultural moment with Vanity Fair and the upcoming SBF Netflix series.

Tune into this week’s Rollup! 👇

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