The Race to Build Agentic Commerce
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:
- 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.
- 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 micro-transactions. 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...
that his main takeaway from his work on the famous Transformer paper (the one that unlocked AI as we know it) was that AI will be the new GUI. The visual manifestation of the internet as we know it today will be replaced by our own localized AI rendering the internet to appear as we need it, in the moment we need it to.
The user-driven internet will be replaced by AI agents and AI queries simply fetching you the information you need, and visually displaying it to you in the best way possible.
You will never load another website again.
There’s just one problem. This will completely disrupt a trillion-dollar industry – ads on the internet. The three-way harmony between:
- Websites producing content
- Users consuming content, for free
- Advertisers financing the websites
...will be totally dismantled by AI routing around all the ads and simply fetching and rendering the content directly for their users.
So if that’s going to happen, how do we actually finance the production of the content worth fetching?
Stablecoins, micro-transactions, and agentic commerce.
Those with content will charge fractions of pennies to the AI agents who want it. The 402 payment gateway that Andreessen baked into the early days of the internet is going to be taken down off the shelf, dusted off, and spawn an entirely new industry of agents throwing quadrillions of pennies all across the internet to pay for and consume the value produced by others.
There is an incredible race to build this new internet. As some dude at Visa said: The agentic web is the biggest opportunity that I’ve seen in my 20-plus years in payment technology.
Coinbase and x402. Tempo and MMP. Stripe’s ACP. Visa’s own CLI interface. Ethereum’s ERC8004. And probably a thousand small-time startups too.
One of the core quest-lines of crypto was the idea of rebuilding the internet from the ground up, based around new incentives that remove users from the siloed traps of Web2.
Before there was Web3, Web2 was good – it helped build the internet. But now more than two decades in, Web2 is starting to show its age, and the flip from value creation to value extraction is well underway.
But now since we have a new blank slate of possibilities, there’s an opportunity to rebuild the internet closer in alignment to the individual users – where their AI agents are their representatives and advocates, and the shape of the internet bends around them.
AI has the potential to put the individual first.
In broad society, there are fears that these AI labs are going to become so incredibly powerful that they end up ruling the world.
Peter Thiel famously called AI a very centralizing technology, because AI is simply leverage for those with resources. This is probably all true, but I’m seeing enough evidence that AI is also a boon to the power, protections, and rights of the individual too.
Lyn Alden echoed this in our recent podcast, when we asked her, “Where is the value of all this AI Capex spending going to accrue? Because all the companies seem to be in a race to spend every penny of profit!” Her response: the value likely ends up with the consumer, who gets very powerful AI models, and those who can leverage AI into their bottom line will benefit the most.
The patterns here are cool to see. There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the future, despite the easy trap of AI paralysis.
The next few years are going to be awesome to watch.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.