Bitcoin for the Agentic Economy

Transcript

Aentic payments has been a common theme today. So I'm happy to continue. Um everybody's talking about what is going to be what um uh what technology is going to enable it, who's going to win the um the payment rails. And um I thought I'd talk today about maybe a thesis that we've been developing over the past uh couple of months that uh may seem counterintuitive um and that's that Bitcoin is actually uh the incumbent payment rail for aentic payments that uh uh has the best sort of pole position to win uh the payment uh payment conversation.

Um so nobody knows who's going to win Aentic payments. Um 75 million payments today very small volume very small transaction um uh amount very high volume but these numbers don't mean anything. It's it's uh extremely small today. um nobody is actually um ahead of the curve or ahead of the pack in terms of being able to en enabling aic payment transactions. Um but there's a big difference um when you come to think about uh payment rails for agents versus humans. Obviously humans uh we care about counter party,

we care about contracts. If you talk about Visa and Mastercard, um they're built to enable human payments. So things like chargebacks, things like um contractual payment obligations, etc. It's very different for agents. Um agents are continuous, very high volume. Um you don't know who the counterparty is. Um right now the average payment is is 30 cents, but it's likely that it's going to be actually a lot smaller. you know, access to APIs, uh, act payment for particular data points, etc., etc. Um, and very importantly, it's it's very likely that there isn't going to be any shared framework, um, in terms of jurisdictional or or legal contracts.

Um, nevertheless, obviously, it's uh clear that Aentic Payments is going to be a huge market. it will um outpace it will outgrow the existing payment volumes that we have today. Um and everybody's trying to figure out what that infrastructure to enable it is going to be. So Mastercard came out with uh with their version of agent pay for machines. Visa is obviously partnering with open AAI. Uh quite interestingly they both came out with those announcements on the same day uh back in June. But obvious as you can see today everybody's thinking about agentic payments. Everybody's trying to figure

out who's going to win. We don't know the answer to that. Um what we do know is what the winning payment solution is going to have to do is going the characteristics that are going to have to be present in order for that winner to take um um to to take the payment rail uh prize. So requirement number one obviously you have to be able to hold to hold value without holding a legal identity. So an agent is never going to be a legal person and an agent is never going to be somebody that has a legal claim. Um, you can think about whether you know a

legal person is going to legally enable their agent, but personally I'm not very keen about having a computer program act in my name. Um, or at least not with uh any full uh authority under the law. Uh in any case, it's clear that uh we want an agent to be able to hold economic value uh without uh without being a full representation of ourselves. Uh second one is uh you want finality on receipts. So and this is the argument that um I think will play very heavily against the existing stable coin solutions. So, stable coins, USDT, USDC,

whatever um whatever is going to uh come into the conversation uh are built to enable uh the issuer to roll back transactions and we see that today. We see USDT transactions being rolled back. We see USDC transactions being rolled back. when agents go to decide the payment rail and and agents go to decide who is going to transfer, how they're going to transfer value um back and forth between each other, this will very likely play against USDC or USDT as the uh the solution of choice because if you're an agent and you're running an algorithm to

select a payment rail, um you want finality to be um to be one of the decision points that you follow. So, being able to roll back transactions, uh, being able to sort of reverse the millions or billions of of transactions in terms of economic value between two agents is going to play against stable coins in our mind. And number three, you know, issue can freeze assets. So we we obviously uh uh not only rolling back transactions but actually roll but actually freezing uh significant amount of of funds significant amount of economic transfer activity that's taking place between

agents is again something that uh will play against most of the payment rails but this is where uh Bitcoin actually has been holding its own for um you know 18 17 18 years now. um a Bitcoin transaction is immutable. It's irreversible. Uh many people have tried over the years uh to figure out a way to do it and and uh haven't been able to. And the fourth requirement that we think is very important is uh instant authorization. Not that we think it's very important but it is very important is obviously uh as those agentic transactions uh take place in a split

second um all of the settlement has to take place um uh concurrently with that. So as as I mentioned but we bitcoin meets three of those uh immediately today off the bat. obviously can hold value without a legal identity by just being able to control the Bitcoin wallet that uh already exists today. Millions, tens of millions of wallets do that. Uh finality on receipt uh Bitcoin transactions are not reversible. Um we talked about that. No issuer can freeze that. The instant authorization part is uh is where Bitcoin uh is coming up short.

Um and uh this is one of the one of the solutions that uh go mining has been uh working on to address um over the past couple of couple of years. Uh so go mining um what we do is uh uh our initial product was tokenized hash rate. We tokenized about 18 eggs a hash um of bitcoin hash rate. It's about just under 2% of the global hash rate today. And through that, through our digital mining product, we made uh participation in Bitcoin mining possible for as little as $25 of initial investment.

Uh and then around that we've built an ecosystem of services um that allows our users to earn Bitcoin to spend bitcoin via payment cards with uh uh hash power um rewards um through uh simple earn product that pays uh yield or interest on bitcoin uh balances or stable coin balances and then obviously lend against bitcoin um as well and we've been working on a solution ution to address the instantaneous uh being able to instantaneously approve Bitcoin transactions. Um over the past year, we've come up with a what we think is a clever way of doing it. We rolled it out

in uh in May of uh this year at Consensus in Miami. Um and we think that that is uh going to solve the fourth challenge for uh Bitcoin being able uh to participate as a payment rail for Aentic Payments. Um and in a short takeaway, um we don't know who will win Aentic Payments. Um but we know what the winner is going to need to have. And uh to our mind, Bitcoin has the most um characteristics now of what we think is going to be the uh the winning solution. So we have in addition to everything we've listed,

Bitcoin obviously has the deepest liquidity available 24 by7. There's billions of dollars in infrastructure investment that the mining community, the Bitcoin mining community has made over the previous uh uh 17 years that have withtood uh the test of time during that time with, you know, multiple bad actors, both private and state actors to be honest, uh trying to figure out how to compromise the Bitcoin network. None have been successful. Uh and we think that all of those factors combined will play very much in Bitcoin's favor. Obviously, nobody's

able to predict the future, but to our mind, um all of these characteristics make Bitcoin the uh the favorite incumbent to win the uh aentic payment uh uh competition. So, with that, thank you very much.