Meta’s Muse: The Agent Becomes the Control Point

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Three weeks ago I argued that Meta would stay upstream as a preference and affinity layer and leave checkout to retailers. Half of that held. Meta is not taking checkout from retailers. But Muse is more than a preference layer. It is an attempt to build a new orchestration point, one that sits between the consumer, the merchant, the wallet, and the payment network.

The shift I am watching is from wallet-centric commerce, where the merchant owns the interaction and presents payment choices, to agent-centric commerce, where the agent orchestrates merchant, wallet, credential, and transaction. If that shift happens at scale, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, PayPal, banks, and wallets become services the agent can use. Meta owns the consumer relationship and the purchase intent, which is worth more.

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Nubank Circling Monzo?

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News Saturday is that Nubank is in early talks to buy Monzo for £8–10 billion. That is roughly double Monzo’s last private valuation and 115x pre-tax profit. Monzo’s board is reportedly weighing the approach against a funding round, an IPO, or a secondary sale.

This is my third post on the neobank cohort in a year. I’m a skeptic on the neobank revolution, and admittedly few people share my negativity. My recent posts are The Neobank Revolution? Not how I see it… and Challenger Banks: What the Sell-Side is Telling Us. In July I conceded I had been wrong on profitability: Nubank and Revolut have crossed into something like institutional adulthood, and Monzo has three consecutive profitable years.

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Why Closed Chains Work Best for Banks

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a16z crypto published Banks Don’t Need Closed Blockchains (written by Rebecca Rettig of Jito Labs). The legal reading is solid. The BSA and OFAC ask for control proportionate to identified risk, not zero risk, and no rule says a bank must own or screen the infrastructure its messages travel over. I have no argument with any of that.

HOWEVER, the conclusion does not follow. Banks are not sitting in permissioned networks because a statute traps them there. They are sitting there because that is where their trust model, their commercial agreements, investments, and their competitive advantage already live. I made this case in The Realities of On Chain Finance: Why Closed Ledgers Will Lead the Way and the last 18 months have only confirmed it.

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CLARITY Act Fails — GENIUS Holds

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This post is not really about the bill, though. It is about the thing the bill was carrying and implications for Stablecoin

As expected, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act failed to move through the Senate.

Yesterday, the Senate cloture motion on H.R. 3633 fell 49–50 — eleven votes short of the sixty required to advance, and one shy of even a bare majority. Multiple Republicans voted no. Senator Chris Coons did not vote. Senator Cynthia Lummis made the closing pitch on the floor: “Do not let this day be the day we handed our future to someone else because we were too afraid to finish what we started” and could not find the votes. Bitcoin slid from near $80,000; Coinbase closed down almost 9%.

Nobody who was reading the tape should be surprised. I have been writing this outcome down in stages since February. In Stablecoin Rewards’ Last Hope – Clarity Act I put the odds at roughly 70% and named the two things that would sink it: the rewards fight and the calendar. In The CLARITY Act Is Locked I flagged the remaining hurdles: Senate Agriculture jurisdiction, sixty floor votes, House reconciliation, …etc. and wrote that if the floor count fell short the bill slides to the next Congress. Prediction markets took until August to agree, collapsing from 82% to under 20%, and sat at 14% on the morning of the vote itself. Market structure legislation is not a 2026 story and it may not be a 2027 story either.

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Meta’s AI Move: From Ad Network to Agentic Preference Layer

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A reader comment last week pushed on the Meta AI question. The short version: Meta isn’t trying to own agentic commerce (a smart play given merchant control), and what they are doing is more interesting than most people are giving them credit for.

The Architecture Is Already Set

First, a quick recap of where we stand. The winning model in agentic commerce is the retailer-owned specialist agent. Walmart’s Sparky, Amazon’s Rufus (now Alexa Shopping), Michaels’ Ask Mike. The merchant keeps checkout, keeps the customer relationship, and keeps the data. They’ve essentially built an intelligence layer inside themselves. Anthropic’s Claude Commerce Agents blueprint, open-sourced in September 2026, formalizes exactly this structure: shopping agents and merchant agents that sit within the merchant’s perimeter, not as a consumer-facing oracle trying to own the relationship.

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Anthropic’s New Agents: Picking the Right Side of the Counter

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Short blog. Member only post.

On September 2, Anthropic released Claude Commerce Agents, an open blueprint for building shopping agents and merchant operations agents on Claude. Linas Beliūnas has a good writeup of what actually shipped (Claude Commerce Agents: Anthropic’s Bet on Agentic Commerce). My take is simpler than his, and more opinionated.

Anthropic just made the only bet in this market that I think pays off over the next three years. They are not trying to own the consumer. They are trying to be the intelligence layer inside the merchant’s own store, app and back office. Everyone else is still fighting over the gateway.

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EMVCo Enters the Intent Wars

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September 2026 – VERY VERY LONG Tech Blog on EMVCo’s new Spec

On September 1, 2026, EMVCo published a draft framework that quietly changes the architecture of agentic commerce. The “EMV Agentic Payments — Framework for Specifications” establishes a neutral, interoperable conceptual foundation for managing consumer intent across the entire payment ecosystem. After more than a year of watching proprietary platforms race to own and orchestrate “everything” in agentic, this is the most significant structural move the industry has seen.

I have written about this problem extensively, from Agentic — Intent and the New Data Games to Carts and Mandates: Decoupling Discovery, Authentication, and Liability to Agentic Data Battle: Intent. The core argument has always been the same: without a structure for managing intent, there will be no trust in agentic transactions. EMVCo just read that memo.

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Instinct: Hottest Agentic Assistant – Payments Advantage?

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Short Blog.

Every few months something breaks out of the demo phase and starts showing up in my feed from people whose judgment I trust. This month it is Instinct, a personal assistant out of San Francisco that the WSJ covered on Friday (“The Latest Viral AI Assistant Rocketing Across Silicon Valley,”). It is worth a look, not because it solves agentic commerce (it does not), but because it is the clearest example yet of where agentic actually gets traction first, and it is not where the payments industry has been looking.

The advantages of edge Use Cases and SMS…. the biggest breakthrough is happening in categories where there is no cart at all.

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Identity Success Story – itsme Belgium

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This is the fourth case study I have written on inational identity efforts. The first was India’s UIDAI, which I covered in Payments and Identity, UPI continues to lead the world. The second was Norway, in BankID Norway, Evolution and Success, last month i outlined eIDAS, Top 3 Problems. Belgium’s itsme is a fantastic collaboration of banks and mobile operators in a commercial model, it may be the cleanest available proof of my rule of thumb on identity success (see Part 1 – Identity Models, Government and Governance Structures).

Summary of today’s thesis: European digital identity is succeeding at the country level, wherever commercial entities are allowed to own the governance and the economics, and it is failing at the EU and regulatory level, where neither is defined (or mandates set). Belgium is NOT a counterexample to Europe’s identity problem. In my view, Belgium represents an example model for the answer Europe is looking for.

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ApplePay at Walmart

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Walmart announced yesterday that tap to pay arrives at select Walmart and Sam’s Club locations on August 24, with all US stores and clubs by the end of 2026 and fuel stations by mid 2027. The largest retailer in the country, and the last major holdout on contactless, is turning it on. What a great “going away” present to Jennifer Bailey!.

This is a bigger deal than the press release suggests. Walmart did not resist contactless because it disliked the technology. It resisted because contactless threatened a payment cost structure it spent twenty years building. The news here is not that Walmart added a feature. It is that Walmart concluded the feature no longer costs it anything.

For readers who want the plumbing, I laid out the EMVCo and tokenization dependencies in Understanding ApplePay in PIN Debit (May 2026). This post is the business version.

What I told Apple, repeatedly

Jennifer Bailey at Apple would always ask me the same question: “How can we get Mike [Cook] to accept ApplePay?” My answer never changed, I told her “It was not about Apple.” It was about three things:

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