Category: Negocios

Big week for agentic payments:

Anchorage Digital launched Agentic Banking on May 5, a regulated trust and settlement layer that lets institutions fund and govern AI agents holding and moving money. Settlement runs across stablecoins, fiat rails, and tokenized credentials. Compliance enforced through corporate spending policies, “Know Your Agent” identity standards, and real-time controls.

The same day, the Solana Foundation and Google Cloud launched Pay.sh, an open-source marketplace for AI agents to discover, access, and pay for APIs on a pay-per-request basis. The first APIs available include Gemini, BigQuery, and Vertex AI. Payments settle in stablecoins on Solana.

Two different stacks, same week, same shape. One is the bank for AI capital. The other is a working machine-to-machine commerce protocol with real money moving through it.

For most of the past year, the AI + payments conversation has been hypothetical. What rails do agents need to transact at scale? Who governs that activity? What changes when an agent, not a human, is the buyer. Those questions got actual product answers this week.

The agentic economy is going to run on stablecoin. Stablecoins meet the four requirements machine-to-machine payments need at scale: 24/7 settlement, programmable spending controls, transaction-level auditability, cross-border by default. No fiat rail meets all four. Cards meet none.

“Know Your Agent” is also hey: KYA is now a defined compliance category, on the same footing as KYC, with the regulated incumbent defining it first.

It’s going to be an interesting few months as this infrastructure layer gains institutional trust to actually hold and move money.

It is very cool to see how Western Union is looking to replace SWIFT inside its own network.

This is part of global trend in remittances, where WU (and many others) are using stablecoins for settlement between themselves and their global agent network.

USDPT (“US Dollar Payment Token”), their new dollar-backed stablecoin on Solana issued by Anchorage Digital went live last week in Philippines and Bolivia, with the rest of the network planned to roll out during the course of 2026.

Today, settlement between Western Union and its agents runs on correspondent banking rails. Those rails pause on weekends and holidays. USDPT settles in seconds, 24/7.

I see this as WU defending their moat: the agent network. The correspondent banking layer is not worth focusing on, it’s a commodity.

This is the best kind of boring for stablecoin adoption. A 175-year-old company quietly pulling its treasury operations on-chain because the rails are faster and cheaper. The consumer never has to know.

This is not unique to them. Across our remittance and payouts partner book at Transak, the same pattern repeats. On-chain settlement is moving from a competitive edge to a default expectation.

The question this opens up for the next 12 months: once stablecoin-native remittance players can plug into the same agent infrastructure on equal footing, does the agent network moat hold? Will people still need to go to physical locations to get cash?

One of my favorite kinds of stablecoin news is the kind that doesn’t tell you it’s stablecoin news.

Meta started paying creators in Colombia and the Philippines in stablecoins (USDC) this week, in partnership with Bridge/Stripe, Solana and Polygon Labs (link in comments).

This is not coincidental, they are both markets with strong existing dollar demand: Colombia’s peso has been under pressure for two years, the Philippines is one of the largest remittance receivers in the world.

The press release barely mentions crypto. The creator dashboard probably mentions it even less. I was one the Payments Partnerships team at (the-company-formerly-known-as) Facebook during Libra.

New brand, new global money, congressional hearings, regulator pushback, years of fallout. This is a refreshing approach: USDC on Polygon, behind Stripe’s existing payout rails, framed to creators as “your money, faster.” Sitting on top of existing payment rails.

The most interesting stablecoin use cases were never going to be the ones with “stablecoin” in the headline. Nobody cares in the real world. They’re the ones where a creator in Manila gets paid Tuesday instead of next month and never thinks about it.

In financial services boring is better.

Some people think cross border payments are a pricing problem but it’s actually a cost structure problem.

The goal of every company is to make money, grow revenue. You can do this via two ways: increase sales or reduce costs. Most teams focus on the former when the latter is where you can find real leverage.

For instance, any business moving money across borders has to deal with several factors that directly impact your unit economics:

– Fees across multiple intermediaries
– FX spreads that eat into margins
– Capital locked across corridors to manage liquidity
– Waiting days for settlement

Stablecoin rails directly address these by moving a few vectors:

– Settlement going from days to minutes
– Costs compress meaningfully
– Capital does not sit idle across markets

You can keep the product the same by changing the rails underneath. At Transak we work obsessively with teams that want to make this shift without rebuilding from scratch.

If you are exploring this as well, you can take a look here: https://lnkd.in/eUwC9EgE

New data from Bitso this week: digital dollars (USDC + USDT combined) just surpassed Bitcoin as the most-purchased crypto asset in Latin America. 40% versus 18%. Full report here.

In Argentina alone, USD-linked assets are 71% of purchases. This is monetary economics expressed through user behavior.

Bitso shows transaction peaks in the days right after monthly salary payments. People are converting pesos to stablecoins because holding pesos costs them. I grew up in Argentina, I saw the same instinct play out with physical dollars. The behavior didn’t change, just the rails.

The dollarization spectrum is widening, not converging: Argentina at 71%, Brazil at 34%, Colombia in the middle at 46%, Mexico carving its own profile around remittance corridors. Each country’s crypto data is now a real-time read on its own monetary conditions, which is very cool. Crypto adoption in LATAM isn’t tied to the cycle anymore.

For the next generation it’s a baseline financial behavior. In some places, crypto wallets are replacing the role of bank accounts entirely. It will be fascinating to see what happens to the next generations’ crypto adoption.

Reading through how a DAO – @LidoFinance in this case – makes decisions illustrates the importance of writing and communication for getting anything done in a decentralized environment.

If we move away from traditional sources of clout, i.e. hierarchy, pedigree, presentation and oratory, gravitas towards a deeper meritocracy then it follows that the amount of participants will both improve decision making while also skewing to new forms of building consensus.

There are tradeoffs to any kind of rule-by-majority but at least you can be confident that those who have the most skin-in-the-game to care will be involved and active.

Check it out here.

Originally tweeted by Andy Werner – awerner.eth (@awerner) on July 28, 2022.

There is a fundamental shift in how web3 organizations vs Web 2.0 companies verify identity vis a vis new contributors.

Would you rather try to figure out what someone can do via an interview process or actually see what a person has done in the past on their wallet?

Originally tweeted by Andy Werner – awerner.eth (@awerner) on July 16, 2022.

Someone – perhaps it was Marc Andreessen, it sounds like something he would say – once said that there will be two kinds of people in the future, those who tell computers what to do and those who are told what to do by computers.

This is in the framework of software eating the world, which by 2022 we can confirm has already happened. Both intriguing and dangerous, what does this mean for our control of society?

Like that joke about how tech enthusiasts have internet-of-things in every device in their house while engineers and people who understand security have a printer from 2004 with a handgun next to it so they can shoot it if it acts up.

The place of artificial intelligence and machine learning in this narrative is evolving into a type of ubiquitous presence that cannot be ignored. In the startup world people don’t even want to hear that your company is powered by AI, they assume it is the case in the same way we have dropped the world “mobile” from any consumer internet offering.

Paying attention to new developments in the field therefore becomes a critical part of digital literacy. You need to really understand algorithms to know why it seems like social media marketing can read your mind; the same applies to generative technologies and certain kinds of media.

The astounding Dall-E 2 system released this week by OpenAI is a perfect example of how figurative art, gaming, advertising, design in general. Tools like it, when made widely available, will deeply impact entire job descriptions.

Automatization has been replacing human labor since the agricultural revolution. Change is frightening but unavoidable. Liberty from menial tasks will create opportunities that are worth embracing.

When you compare the way the biggest five technology firms behave and the way regulators publicly talk about their businesses there is a fundamental disconnect.

Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon are making heavy investments – in increasingly overlaying sectors- that are on steeped in an understanding that they need to innovate to survive. They know their history (see: Fairchild, IBM, Kodak, Blockbuster, etc).

Fascinating piece in this weeks’ The Economist on how they are hiring, acquiring, taking minority positions and otherwise making big bets into fintech, crypto, cars, metaverse, healthcare, space and robotics and they all invest so much in AI it is not considered frontier tech anymore.

La digitalización del dinero y el crecimiento del comercio electrónico son fuerzas inexorables que atentan contra la tendencia en baja de crecimiento de la industria bancaria tradicional.

El 35% del ingreso de la industria de servicios financieros viene por el lado de plataformas de pagos, mientras que la participación del pago en efectivo o tarjeta en comercio electrónico cayó del 60% al 49% en los últimos tres años.

A medida que avanza la industria fintech en mercados en desarrollo ésto sólo va a acelerar. Mientras tanto, los pagos locales tienen un nivel de diversidad que puede abrumar:

Mirando el mapa de métodos globales es notable cuánto avanzó Asia por encima de Estados Unidos o Europa, superando la fragmentación de la región, y lo poco desarrollado que está el tema en África a pesar de casos emblemáticos como m-Pesa.