When AI Agents get money

Welcome back to the Macro AI Podcast.

I'm Gary Sloper, joined here always with my co-host, Scott Bryan.

Today we're gonna talk about something that sounds, I guess at first like a cryptocurrency story, but it really isn't.

It's about what happens when AI agents can spend money, spend money for your organization.

We've spent a lot of time talking about a- agents that can search or reason, use tools, execute workflows, but eventually an agent doing real work runs into a pretty basic problem: it needs to purchase something.

Maybe that's data, additional computing power, or it needs access to a specialized AI model, um, needs to tap into a research service or a shipping service, or even another agent.

And today, the Internet's payment infrastructure really wasn't designed for software that wants to autonomously buy something or purchase something on your behalf that costs three-tenths of a cent.

So Scott, this is where stablecoins, particular USDC, and a payment protocol called X402 are starting to get interesting.

Yeah, exactly.

And I think the important thing at the beginning is to separate this from the crypto investment story, which is-

Right

... what people think about when they hear cryptocurrency.

But we're, we're not talking about an AI agent going out and speculating on Bitcoin.

We're talking about giving software something much closer to programmable cash.

So USDC is a stablecoin issued by Circle, and by definition a, a stablecoin is one... is equal to one US dollar.

So one USDC is equal to $1.

And Circle says USDC is backed by highly liquid dollar-denominated reserves, so primarily cash, short-term treasuries, uh, treasury repurchase agreements, with the majority of the reserve held through a government money market fund managed by BlackRock.

So Circle also publishes reserve information and receives monthly third-party assurance on their, on their cash.

So instead of thinking cryptocurrency, a better starting point for the discussion is digital dollars that software can hold and move programmatically.