Augustus Protocol & Emerging Settlement Standards: The Crypto Clearing Bank Arrives

In May 2026, Augustus (formerly Ivy) received conditional OCC approval to establish the first “AI-era clearing bank” a federally chartered national bank built on a stablecoin-native core designed for 24/7 programmable clearing. The announcement has drawn attention for its ambition: replacing legacy correspondent banking infrastructure with always-on, machine-initiated settlement. But beneath the compelling narrative lies a more nuanced reality about the structure of U.S. financial settlement and the commercial dynamics that govern it.

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Is Know Your Agent (KYA) Really Necessary?

Is “Know Your Agent” (KYA) Really Necessary? The tale of an Orphan Signal

Short Blog | June 2026

A new category of startup has emerged around “Know Your Agent” (KYA) — the idea that merchants and payment platforms need a framework to verify the identity, authority, and auditability of AI agents acting on behalf of consumers. PYMNTS has covered the space extensively, and KnowYourAgent.xyz is already pitching merchants on “identity, policy controls, and evidence for every AI-agent transaction at checkout.” The framing is intuitive: if a bot is buying something, shouldn’t you know who sent it?

I want to push back — not on the problem, but on whether KYA, as a standalone service category, is the right solution.

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Carts and Mandates: Decoupling Discovery, Authentication, and Liability 

Executive Summary

I just got back from 2 weeks of vacation and catching up on all that transpired. No one reads this blog for its technical depth, but a few browse it for the economic implications and power struggles going on behind the scenes (hence “inside baseball”).

I/O 2026 was last week (see product announcements). The Commerce team showed how Universal Cart, Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) would drive a frictionless revolution in digital commerce.  By consolidating products from Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail into a single persistent cart, Google is attempting to establish itself as the default transaction and orchestration layer of the internet. While consumers would love to engage across any platform and any retailer from any device…. A universal cart is also necessary for operating across any agentic platform and “specialist”.  Agentic commerce is certainly gaining traction, but Walmart’s Rufas and Amazon’s Alexa also want to play in the game at the front end (so does Open AI)

Wallet expansion to universal cart is great for Google; however, it’s not great for everyone else, as platforms make for poor custodians (i.e., they are not neutral). Particularly when it comes to controlling credentials and measuring their own effectiveness.  My concerns here are shared by retailers, banks, processors and networks as this architecture conceals a profound structural conflict over control and economic value.  Google’s “own-it-all” will create a great customer experience, and allow them to move agentic from the current “conversational commerce to merchant checkout” state, but who wants to invest in a platform where they become disintermediated, or a dumb fulfillment pipe? 

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The Power to Price

The best lever of economic margin for investors to track is power to price. In classical economics, pricing power is not merely a reflection of market share, but rather the capacity of an economic actor to minimize transaction costs while maintaining strategic control over data, risk, and user experience. Historically, eCommerce has operated under a macroeconomic paradigm where merchants absorb the operational and financial frictions of the conversion funnel, while payment networks and processors leverage their scale to price security, identity, VAS and settlement infrastructure.

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Stripe Sessions 2026: Takeaways

It has taken two weeks, but I’m finally 20% through processing Stripe Sessions 2026 (my first). I’ll say it plainly: I was absolutely blown away by the energy, the talent, the ambition, and frankly, the sheer scale of what Stripe is building. My only real complaint? The rooms needed to be bigger. A lot bigger.

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EMVCo and DPCs

This should be a 20 page blog… but I don’t have time this week. Big picture thoughts

The April 28, 2026 announcement of Google’s donation of the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) to the FIDO Alliance signals Google’s desire to move payments from the legacy Device Primary Account Number (DPAN) model to the Digital Payment Credential (DPC) mandate framework. For identity and payment experts, this shift represents more than a technical update; it is an effort to commoditize the proprietary trust moats built by card networks and Apple through a standardized, platform-agnostic infrastructure.

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AP2 Donation to FIDO 

Yesterday Google donated AP2 to the FIDO Alliance , let me share my thoughts on what this means.  

  1. Effort to drive cross-industry standardization and extend Google’s established success within the FIDO ecosystem (log in with Google) while addressing the structural limitations of FIDO.
  2. A “tipping point” transition from “Identity as a Service” to “Identity as an Infrastructure,” where the mobile handset functions as the primary root of trust for autonomous commerce. Google is telling FIDO that they must incorporate elements of W3C VCs to have a future.
  3. Google’s first big public move toward device bound credentials (Titan M2, Anroid Credential Manager, Android Ready Alliance, …etc).

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American Express Breaks the Agentic Commerce Deadlock: Why Today Matters

Why is this big news? Once one network says “we cover agent errors,” the others can’t say no.

The Problem We’ve Been Waiting for a Network to Solve

For the past eighteen months, I’ve written extensively about agentic commerce as a test of *incentive alignment*, not technology. The tech works. What doesn’t work is getting all parties—networks, issuers, merchants, platforms, and payment processors—to align around who owns the agent, who owns the data, and who bears the risk.

Today, American Express did something important: it solved that problem for its own closed loop (and its customer base). What does this mean? I hope it means US Issuers will lean in on the V/MA solutions that can allow them to operate at near parity (V/MA have the rules, tech and governance). But changing a network is really hard.

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MPP Phase 2 Live – Ask Tom Goes Agentic

Long blog – First 2 Pages are economic implications, last 6 pages are tech deep dive

MPP is a big deal because value exchange enables specialization and market forces to operate (as discussed in last week’s MPP – Addressing the Internet’s “Original Sin”.MPP and X402 are BIG.. really big. A whole new market. This isn’t about cash replacement or taking share from xx this is about enabling a new Economy. Today’s blog is 4 paragraphs of the economic implications (for investors and CEOs), followed by 4 pages on tech detail covering what I built. Please note “Ask-Tom” is just a model of an x402 service…. of course it won’t generate much demand (service ID is at bottom).

First, let me try to explain why this is such a big deal from an economic perspective. The foundational driver for MPP’s success is the radical reduction of transaction costs through standardized commercial terms. As outlined in my 2016 blog Small Wins, the forces that once drove asset-heavy, integrated organizations are atrophying in favor of “refragmentation” and specialized networks. Historically, the economic cost of inking a bilateral contract for every micro-interaction was prohibitive (ex “Account Creation” bottleneck that stifled agentic autonomy). Following the principles of Ronald Coase’s Transaction Cost Economics, MPP and x402 provide the multilateral governance and common commercial rules necessary to bypass these friction points. By establishing trust and speed through a common interface, these protocols allow for the “Small Win” of a single transaction to scale into a global network effect, where the cost of connection approaches zero.

This standardization enables the “Value Assembly” of “super-specialists” who can target previously unreachable “shale deposits” of niche market demand (see Network Effects and Value Assembly). A successful network enables specialists like “Ask-Tom” to provide high-value, grounded intelligence without the overhead of building independent settlement or reconciliation infrastructure. This is far beyond mere “agentic commerce”; it is an evolution in how software and hardware interact with EVERYTHING ECONOMICALLY. For example, MPP’s session-based economics provides a virtual “bar tab” for agents to execute tasks within human-granted budgets, paying only for precise resource consumption. This creates a sustainable commercial model where the incentives for specialization and market forces to operate on software service at a hyper granular level. Market forces in turn encourage specialists to solve increasingly granular problems across diverse domains, and unlocks the “shale deposits” of data that doesn’t play. I’ll discuss what this could look like next week as a follow up to Value Assembly.

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MPP Test – Demonstrating Significance: Phase 1 is Live

For over 60 years we have been focused on human-centric communication in our networks. While we still have payment problems in this interaction, a whole world is evolving where machines interact with other machines. The scale of this interaction is limited by value exchange — after all, who wants to spend resources answering a bot’s question if they are just stealing your data and delivering no new customers (see this blog covering Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s comments).

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