Unchained
Why AI Agents Might Require Humans to Transact More Than as You Think
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Show notes
Will AI agents use cards or stablecoins? Here’s how two crypto VCs see the agentic future shaping up.
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What happens when merchants are code instead of storefronts? Noah Levine and Robbie Petersen debate whether stablecoins or cards win in an agentic economy, and more importantly, where the profit pools end up.
One sees headless merchants driving a new payment stack; the other warns that front ends never fully disappear. Both agree on this: traditional fraud detection will likely fail against AI behavior patterns, and the rails question masks a deeper problem of regulatory and social inertia.
The outcome hinges on whether permissionless infrastructure can outcompete existing payment incumbents, and whether agentic commerce actually scales beyond niche use cases.
Guest:
Noah Levine, Partner at a16z
Robbie Petersen, Junior Partner at Dragonfly
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