When Bots Have Bank Accounts: The Rise of the Agent Economy (With Sean Neville, Catena Labs)

Transcript

You co-ounded Circle and now you're working on something new, an AI bank. >> The internet itself is going agent native. Really, agents doing anything. We think they'll need to get paid. They'll need to make payments. They'll need to generate some sort of return or be rewarded for holding a balance. They may want to lend. They may want to apply for credit in certain situations. They'll want to do all the things that a bank might do for a business. Ultimately, we'll need an AI bank that is actually for other AIs. >> You believe that these agents are going to be the only ones that we actually trust with our assets. What is going to make people won over by bots? >> Why would you ever trust it with your money? Worst outcome is you build a lot of amazing stuff that nobody wants.

>> Sean, thank you so much for being here. It >> was a pleasure. You co-founded Circle. You architected USDC stablecoin that lots and lots of people throughout crypto and beyond are now using as crypto and tradi sort of intersect. And now you're working on something new. You're building what you've described as an AI bank. What do you mean by that? >> Well, we're taking the next step. Uh once we have stable coins and we have the ability to represent dollars on internet rails, what kind of new uh opportunities does that unlock? At the same time, we were contemplating that you could see clearly the web, the internet itself is going agent native.

And after working in AI for quite some time developed conviction that um as AI actors become economic participants they will ultimately be the primary dominant economic participants in the world for all kinds of activities payments and otherwise. I think you know flash forward in a few years I think they may be the only actors that we trust with our assets and the only actors that are capable of generating meaningful return on our assets. We're certainly not there today. And so what do we need to do in order to get there to unlock a you know I think a level of prosperity Alexa the likes of which the world hasn't seen yet. And it turns out there's some fundamental things missing. So one of the things we're doing is we're working on some infrastructure to make it safe and trustworthy for AI actors to participate in the economy and then

we're building on top of that foundation uh what has been called an AI bank or an AI native bank. So that's that's what we're working on. >> So you said that you believe that these agents are going to be the only ones that we actually trust with our assets. I mean, we're living in a world right now where there's famous Gallup polls about trust in institutions just crashing, utterly crashing over like recent decades. Trust is a hard to come by resource nowadays. What is going to make people won over by bots? >> It was similar in some ways to uh trust and money flows. You know, the the old way of managing trust was let's have a whole bunch of regulations that tie humans and the businesses they create uh to a set of rules so that at least when they prove that they're not trustworthy,

we have uh sort of clear liability paths and repercussions. And now we have something that's improve an improvement on that which is we have the ability to encode trust into software using cryptography on rails that no one can control and it's a common good a public utility for the world. And so you know similarly when we look forward to semi-autonomous or autonomous actors that are acting on our behalf to do all kinds of things a hyperpersonalized you know bank for you that's different from me but those things interact. What are the elements of trust to enable that sort of thing to happen because you mentioned the word bots. Yeah.

>> Today one of the examples where that world is impossible is if you look at the existing risk infrastructure in financial institutions which is designed to make sure no bots can participate because they're all bad. Make sure you're a KYC individual or KYB business. >> I use the word intentionally because people have a bad association with it. >> Absolutely. And for good reason. But what we really need is a system of risk that can say let's assume the only participants will be bots but still keep the bad bots out, the bad actors out, but have some way of identifying the good bots that we want to interact with and then beyond that apply policies to them. So we can say, you know, I I would like to interact with uh the Amazon bot agent. No one can agree on what an agent is, but you know, let's we'll stick with

the word bot for now. >> The first time I people were talking about the agentic economy, I was like, what are you talking about? >> Agentic sounds like agent-ish because no one wanted to, you know, there's a lot of infighting around how do you define an agent? So, >> I was like, is this like James Bond stuff? Where are these agents coming from? What are we talking about here? >> Well, I can give you how I would define an agent, but everyone seems to everyone in the AI, you know, domain seems to have a slightly different view. But I do think when it comes to things like risk infrastructure, we need a way to verify agent identities in a way that says who do I want my agents to interact with and how can I prove that it's actually how can I prove it's actually Amazon's agent

that I'm interacting with and then how do I give it policies to say you know spend up to $200 in this time period but don't spend more without asking me like how do I do those things and please >> don't make any paper clips >> don't clips [laughter] yeah and then like and help me understand why you're making these decisions so a degree of auditability after the And so these things don't really exist yet at the foundational layer of of agent activity. We're still struggling with, you know, people's anecdotal experiences with AI is they use I'm not going to pick on a particular one. They use a a general chatbot and it hallucinates a terrible recipe for chocolate chip cookies. Why would you ever trust it with your money?

At the same time, >> it hallucinates more money in my bank account. I might be more open to it. [laughter] >> The integration is actually, I think, one of the big problems now. The LLMs, the foundational LMS are good enough now to make a level of decisions that can be judged and sort of evaluated, but the integration with the [snorts] real world, executing APIs or tools and applying policies to those is is much more difficult. You can you can sort of demonstrate it say an agent uh even a chatbot executing a particular tool buying groceries or whatever it is in a demo that is impressive but it it kind of obiscates the fact that making it truly reliable is extremely difficult right now and there is a way to do it

and we're getting better and better at it and this is the worst it will ever be. It will only get better. But that really is when it comes to trust. Those are the kinds of issues to resolve with um really agents doing anything, agents in healthcare, agents managing air traffic, you know, whatever. But particularly in finance. [laughter] [snorts] Wow. Air traffic. Yeah. You mentioned earlier this sort of spectrum of going from semi-autonomous to autonomous. I feel like that elides a lot of, you know, what needs to happen along the way. what's the state of the technology now and how do you expect it to play out to get from training wheels to fullon you know autonomy >> so I would maybe couch it in a couple of ways um one is related to what we're

building now uh at Katana top the foundation um you know our belief is that ultimately workflows that have agents as participants so groups of agents composed together to do things we think they'll need to get paid they'll need to make payments once they're doing that they'll have access access to funds. They'll probably need to manage FX whether it's between even different stable coins or FX to stables or traditional FX. They'll need to generate some sort of return or be rewarded for holding a balance. And interestingly, so they need to do all of these things. They may want to lend. They may they may want to apply for credit in certain situations. They'll want to do all the things that a bank might do for a business. And so ultimately, we'll need an AI bank that is actually for other AIs. We're not there today. Um but that

kind of service imagines, you know, something that is a much more autonomous system that can execute financial activities safely still with humans in the loop. You know, acting autonomous doesn't mean that there aren't checks with humans for certain things. Semi-autonomous, the line begins to blur between humans in the loop and AI in the loop. Um and semi-autonomous are activities where LLM may be planning executing a plan uh making a plan and then beginning to execute on it using tools but with heavy human interaction. So not consistently running that loop forever. So there's a little bit of a of a spectrum of how you define humans in the loop with workflows that involve LLM versus workflows that involve maybe some humans in the loop and that's a little

bit of things. So that's generally how we think about it where we are. I think um in certain domains, we've seen a lot of progress with AI as economic participants, but what we haven't yet seen at scale as we're talking today is agents actually paying agents. We're not even really seeing agents communicating with other agents yet. We're seeing agents pay for access to APIs or access for data or paying humans. We're seeing humans pay into AI workflows in some cases, but we're not really seeing agents, these compositions of agents working together as semi-autonomous or autonomous entities. And and so there are some things missing to even make that possible. There's a lot of discussion around how do agents even communicate with each other. If we're just interacting with a chatbot where we're using a web browser and it's a

human interaction with some sort of, you know, HTTP interface, how do two agents talk? Is it going to be over HTTP? But what if they need to talk over SMS or over you know voice lines or you know various other mechanisms? We haven't defined those things yet. We basically haven't define the SSL for secure agent agent communication let alone payment flows. And so we still need to address that foundational layer and there's a lot of debate about what that layer looks like would ideally want to see standard that we can all say hey this is how you do these things. If you and I go build a e-commerce you know shop we put it online. We don't really have to think about SSL or do we have to do it the Microsoft way or the Apple way or whatever. It's just a it's a common

standard. We can all go implement those things. Right now, that kind of thing just doesn't exist at all for for agent development. >> There are a number of people putting forward standards, ideas for early standards and protocols like X42, MCP. What is your sense of how this is going to shake out? >> I'd say it's more fragmented now than it was 3 6 months ago. uh when it comes to things like representing agentic identity or KYA or know your agent as as we're saying and a lot of different approaches to payments um some are approaches that have been promoted by I would say large incumbents u but in a way that doesn't necessarily bring other incumbents on board and some are are by uh groups that are more I would say on the startup end of the spectrum. I think there is interest in collaborating on some of these

foundational elements because it stands to grow the value pie for everybody but right now in AI it's so things are moving so quickly and it's so early that I think it's unclear exactly where the value will acrue and so a lot of groups are trying to own the entire stack because they don't want to necessarily give away the place where the value may occur which is not unlike where we were back in the days of online services before the internet exploded and there was America online and Prodigy or whatever and you know we could send email to each other if we were both on AOL but that was the only way and we paid 15 bucks a month or whatever it was for the privilege. X42 you mentioned is is a you know payment protocol that is interesting. There have been people who have kind of come on board with versions

of it but even the different versions are a little bit fragmented themselves and some of the larger players have not yet come on board. So for for instance there's a lot of focus on X42 for um allowing scrapers either for pre-training or even at inference time to access data as a potential solution for paying for content acquisition which is a great concept. Um but if no major publishers come on board and no major scrapers come on board then it's just tech. And so the hard problem with solidifying some of these foundational standards is not so much the technology.

It's not is X42 better than this other you know protocol. It's more who can bring together at the table, you know, uh, the right parties who normally really hate talking to each other to agree on a on an approach. >> What lessons have you learned from building Circle that you're now applying to your new company? >> Well, one lesson uh, you know, that I think we embraced at Circle that is relevant to developing AI, I'll sort of frame it in the sort of context of of delivering a product. And so at a typical software company, there are usually like three dominant forces at the table and then a bunch of supporting forces. But the three dominant forces are engineers that have people write the thing. Product people, >> which is your background.

>> My background is engineering. Yeah, I was a software engineer. And then product people, uh, and then some form of sales or marketing, partnership development. Usually those three are the are the key sort of forces. And you really want them all to work in tandem. In crypto, I think it's often the case that engineering is ahead of the other two groups. And the worst outcome is you build a lot of amazing stuff that nobody wants. Um, and doesn't end up having a lot of utility value to other people. The danger of sales or marketing being out ahead is you you build things that everybody wants, but they can't actually be built, at least not in any reasonable time frame. And so you're sort of selling vaporware. And then the product one has a few issues. But if the product team is sort of out ahead of everyone

else, you end up with this kind of elite cabal of people who create um you know reports and slide decks and they go to the conferences and they talk about all these things and then you really never hear anything more about it other like it's in Discord or it's tweeted there's no substance that ever really emerges. Uh and so really you want all those three together. The lesson that I was going to go to with Circle is there's actually a fourth major stakeholder at the table which is the regulatory component. Uh-huh. >> And that's very different from other kinds of software. And they're not just supporting, they're not GNA in the background. Actually are a major stakeholder supplying requirements and helping facilitate development of a product that can, you know, do great

things. >> Still important postgenius, >> even more important because now there's a regulatory playbook that people can march toward. Um it was much harder before certainly in the stable coin space when institutions, customers, businesses were just unsure how the United States government viewed US dollars on blockchains. Are they securities? Are the funds? How what are the consumer protections? How do the reserves need to be configured? And all those things are prescribed now. So it's much clearer so someone can actually come to the table and say here's the playbook. But we actually have one um that will get the US government stamp of approval so that anyone who is accepting a a payment dollar stable coin can rest assured it is a payment dollar stable coin that the US government stands behind. I was going to describe what you

what we were saying earlier about engineering product and sales and marketing. It sounded like a threebody problem to me like you've got these three different entities with their own gravitational attractions and trying to like manipulate them so they're working in tandem and understanding how they function together. >> Yeah. I mean that is the puzzle of building a successful software business is you know balancing those three but it is the case not just in finance but in other industries healthcare and and other heavily regulated industries that the regulatory piece is an important strategic element to think about when you're doing a product roadmap when you're actually executing. I've got to ask you this. Uh, as somebody who invented one of the most important stable coins out there right now, the most significant stable coins, you don't like the term stable coin. Why?

>> I've never loved the word stable coin. And I think that maybe at some point we just stop using it. I think a lot of people who are uh in the in the non-crypto capital markets use cases who are attracted to stable coins really want dollars. Now, of course, there are other stable coins beyond dollars. There's there's euro coins, there's wine, there's peso, but most of the demand right now is not really for a stable coin or for USDC or any of the others. It's for dollars that run on internet rails and run an internet speed that are fully regulated and programmable. And so it's not really a stable coin, which is a reference to stability relative to crypto. The price is meant to be stable and for the dollar speer dollars on the internet. And we don't have a smarter, sharper, like really

piffy term for that cuz stable coin is easy to say. It kind of rolls off the tongue. But that's kind of my little pet peeve around around stable coins on the AI community. Uh you know, as we were working with with AI engineers before, I would say the last six or seven months, we avoided using the word stable coin because it was so heavily associated with crypto, which still had some some negative connotations, I would say, in the world that we were working in. And that has definitely changed and they've actually now I think people generally are embracing the word stable coin. So maybe that fight is lost at this point. >> One of my favorite points on this is there's a story from a big national media entity and the headline was there's a new cryptocurrency called stablecoin. Here's what it's all about.

>> Yeah. Well, so we put together USC in 2017 2018. Um it rolled it out and then it wasn't really a success in terms of market cap and and transaction volume I'd say until 2020ish. So, it took a it took a little time, but it that's still five years ago. So, but you know, [laughter] better better relate to the party than than never arriving. I guess >> adoption has picked up since then. >> It has. >> You have time for a quick lightning round? >> Well, let's try it. >> Okay. What's the worst advice you've ever received as a founder? So the worst advice, it's actually good advice, but it's not great advice for what we were trying to do particularly with Circle.

And I think the same with Kana, which is find your one customer that has a specific pain point you can address. And the reason it's not great advice, it is good advice for certain kinds of projects, but the reason it's not great advice is because there's a tendency to overindex on what a friend of mine calls like Sam from accounting. and you're solving Sam from accounting's one problem and then 9 to 12 months later you're still solving Sam from accounting's problems and building for Sam for accounting which might get you to a million ARR or something but if you're trying to build a 10 30 50 billion platform company that's you know doing something generational meaningful you can think of multiple customer types at once and you can think you know you have platform think about it so it's not actually bad advice but in our case with

what we were trying to do it would have led us to I think oversimplify on some experiments that were very meaningful in getting us to where we are now. >> It's funny because we were talking on stage with Zack Abrams of Bridge earlier today. One thing from his story is they landed a their first customer of this like Colombian company and it dictated so much of what they ended up building and actually, you know, enabled them to kind of get where they were today. It's funny because it runs kind of counter to that story. >> Oh yeah. I think it's very common advice to find that pain point. Be a painkiller, not a vitamin. That's the cliche and it's a cliche for a reason because that's the way to build companies. But for for me and for what we're trying to do now and I think you

know for Jeremy and for me at circle we were thinking a little bit differently and we've been criticized still today we've been criticized because guys were trying to do too many things. It's very deliberate in what we were doing and it absolutely led to um you know what we've been able to achieve so far with circle >> given that you're working so much in AI I'd love to ask what is your biggest productivity hack? >> So I use all of all the models. My favorite is a local pipeline that connects many of them and this is a total hack. This is not this is not something that's that different from what a lot of people in in AI engineer circles do. The local pipeline I start with claude. So the anthropic models and then I have a series of Gemini and um open AI models judging the output from

claude. who constantly sort of think of them as you know the teachers slapping the knuckles of Claude to try to do better and and I put I workshop through it and I ask you know personal things sort of work through different pipeline with different memory contexts sharing projects and the like and so it's it's not one model though it's not use for this and then claude for this is use them all with different contexts >> you constructed like a Rube Goldberg LLM >> Rub Goldberg sort of local mousetrap >> very nice >> give us a book recommendation >> I would Hey, my classic go-to for startup people in particular is is Ben's hard thing about hard things.

>> So good. Classic. >> Just great. >> He mentioned advice that he he thought was, you know, really good answer to the question of what's bad founder advice, which is hire eight people. Like [laughter] this is great advice, but I mean I wasn't going to hire a bunch of morons. >> Yeah. Thanks. >> Um yeah, so that's always that's always what I recommend. You know, read write own. I mean, obviously you, it sounds a little self- serving, but genuinely that's the book that I pass out to people who need to learn a little bit more about um the reasons that what we're doing in crypto is so important uh to the world. That's another great one. >> That heartens me to hear. Thank you. I hope you're not just saying that.

>> I'm not. Absolutely. >> Finally, last question. What is the smallest hill that you will die on? >> The greatest food ever invented is sushi. [laughter] >> Okay. I I think I might agree with you actually on that. I might die on that hill too. >> Yeah. >> What is your favorite of the sushi? >> So, I'll eat anything. Um I I the closest >> plural of I your sushi. I have no idea. The closest thing I was on the borderline about was anemone. >> Um >> c anemone. Wait, is that that's not the one that like can kill you if it has the >> No, I think that's like the >> poison bladder in it or fish or the fish or something. No, but it's a little spongy. It's a little like a moose sushi of like a pate. as the closest I've ever

come to not liking other but it's the un it's universally the best >> eel kind of rubs me the wrong way too. I'm sort of like it's like kind of like a snake or something. >> I'm good with it. >> Yeah. Right. [laughter] Well, thank you so much for your time. >> That was a great pleasure. Yeah. Thank you.