The 4 Things That Need to Happen Before AI Agents Can Actually Spend Money | An Agentic Payments Explainer
episode
Talking Tokens: Crypto, Onchain Finance, Investing
13 min
2 speakers
5 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What are agentic payments and why are they gaining so much buzz?
Welcome back to Talking Tokens. Today, we are excited to launch a new crossover initiative called Strata Research, where every other week we're going to sit down with our institutional research analyst, Alex, to break down one major timely trend across the industry. These conversations are meant to be a little more educational, analytical, opinionated, and really focused on helping the institutional and crypto native listeners understand where markets and infrastructure is actually moving today. They're going to be short little series, so not like the typical episodes. But for this first one, we're going to dive into agentic payments with Alex. It is one of the biggest emerging conversations happening right now across AI, stablecoins, infrastructure, and something our audience is very familiar with as we just had X4 to creator Eric Rappel on the show. That said, Alex, welcome on.
Good to be here. That's so great to have you. I think I kind of hinted at this in the intro, but agentic payments have become a huge buzzword. Everyone from Coinbase to BlackRock to honestly, even people outside of crypto are talking about it. So before we kind of get into maybe the implications and the infrastructure side, let's start simple on like what is actually an agentic payment and why did you decide to dive into this as the first addition?
Yeah, I think people tend to overcomplicate this a little bit. We keep it simple. An agentic payment, it's any sort of payment transaction that involves an agent. They can be broken down into a few different categories, but typically it's anything from like, you know, booking travel, purchasing inventory, pretty much all of the typical transactions that you would make yourself. But instead of doing it yourself, you're having an agent do it for you. Okay, clear. And why did you decide to focus on this? Yeah, it's something I feel like I didn't know a lot about going into this, and I was very curious about agentic payments. I wanted to understand what all the hype is coming from, what the stack looks like. I read a report from Bain a little bit ago that was talking about the future of agentic payments being anywhere from 300 billion to 500 billion in transaction volume by the year 2030.
which from current levels is a long ways away. X4 R2 today does roughly $10,000 a day. So I was curious how Bain came to that number and what the steps would be to get there.
Yeah, I mean, I appreciate that you weren't necessarily like overhyped about this, as many people who wonderfully come on the show are. I think, you know, some people are realistic that it's very early days. But then to your point, like these current transaction volumes, even if there's tons of them, they're very nominal, right? And that's OK, because like if we're transacting day to day, like if I go to the supermarket or if I'm taking the subway or something like that, like these aren't going to be major transactions like, you know, an institution moving hundreds of millions of dollars in funds. Right. It's a different category.
How are the three distinct agentic‑payment flows structured and what examples illustrate each?
So, yeah, I think maybe on that front, like when it came to Bain's report, what kind of stood out to you there in addition to, you know, what you're talking about with the U.S. e-commerce market right now growing by like 2030? Yeah, I think what was interesting was that it's already here. Last year during Black Friday,
Salesforce did a study on who or how much agentic payments are being used currently. And last year, Black Friday, they came to the conclusion that 20 to 30 percent of all the sales, like Internet sales, people were using AI in some fashion to make the transaction, whether that was like doing research or marketing. you know, I guess like searching between different products, finding good price or even using their agent to make purchases. So it's already here. I think that's something that people don't understand, especially coming from the crypto world. People have this mindset that, you know, agentic payments are still a long ways off. You know, the transaction volumes are very small. It's only focused on micro transactions, which kind of misses a huge market
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What are agentic payments and why are they gaining so much buzz?
0:04–3:10
2
How are the three distinct agentic‑payment flows structured and what examples illustrate each?
3:10–7:27
3
Why is protocol fragmentation a barrier and what solutions could simplify agent‑to‑agent communication?
7:27–10:45
4
What identity, trust, and settlement‑rail upgrades are needed for agents to handle real money?
10:45–12:52
5
Which recent partnerships and tooling advances are moving the market closer to scalable AI‑driven payments?
12:52–13:30
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Talking Tokens: Crypto, Onchain Finance, Investing
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