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Cloudflare’s Agentic Toll Booth
Stablecoins and Agentic Commerce are all the rage these days. Everyone is launching their own stablecoins, payments consortia, L1 blockchain, and/or agentic protocols. It’s a truly exciting time in AI and payments, but it’s also a land-grab, with everyone jockeying to become THE standard by which agentic commerce happens. Cloudflare & Coinbase’s latest attempt to dictate future standards with their NET Dollar and x402 protocol is an interesting development, and also a pretty shrewd and rational move… if you’re Cloudflare. It seems pretty obvious to anyone paying attention to AI these days that we’re about to see an explosion of AI agents doing all sorts of things on the Internet,…
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A Response to Pricenomics
[read this post’s disclaimer below] Priceonomics Blog, a publication I often read with interest, recently posted an article alleging that the major card networks (Visa, MasterCard, Amex) are a “tax†on the United States. You can read the post here. Now, that’s a pretty strong allegation, and while the author spins a tale that sounds both dramatic and nefarious, he also omits crucial context and facts relevant to the discussion.
