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 (and X402) – Solving the Internet’s “Original Sin”

Yes another agentic payment acronym. This one is important enough to remember. Where AP2 and ACP address agents acting on behalf of humans, X402 and MPP are about agents paying agents. My friend Simon Taylor just put together one of his all-time best posts on MPP and The Intention Layer. Today’s blog is a follow-up with a bit more of a comparison, and why this is a big deal from a payment and economic perspective. My key takeaways from Simon’s post

  • The “Skinny Master Account”: Taylor suggests that humans will grant “intent” (a budget and a goal) to an agent. MPP’s Session model perfectly mirrors this: a human “locks” $50 into a session (the intention), and the agent autonomously spends it in sub-cent increments (the execution).
  • The Substrate of AI: Taylor points out that AI thrives on Structured Text (Markdown). Ironically, legacy finance (ISO 8583, NACHA files) is essentially structured text. MPP acts as the “translator” between the agent’s markdown-based intentions and the rigid requirements of the global banking system.
  • The Outcome: The winner won’t be the protocol that is “most decentralized,” but the one that most effectively manages Trust and Permissioning. Stripe and Visa, as the incumbent trust-layers of the internet, are better positioned to solve the “Agentic Spend” problem than a pure-crypto protocol.

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X402 Foundation

Short Blog

The x402 Foundation was publicly announced last week on September 23, 2025, as a joint initiative between Coinbase and Cloudflare. This effort aims to solve the governance issue in agentic. The design COULD SOLVE the governance issues outlined in Governance in Payments as well as last month’s Agentic Commerce Economics and Governance. As a refresh, my position is that monetization/governance is the Gordian knot preventing AI from moving to next stage of growth. 

While Google’s AP2 suffers from a dependency on settlement governance and the inability to expand trust beyond their own domain (see AP2 blog), x402 is just a standard that handles payment terms negotiations between two APIs (both price and method). The foundation turns x402 into a “network) with an operational model, active governance and economics. My example is that an existing customer would have payment managed with a current card on file and the merchant owning risk, whereas a new customer (or new machine request) could agree on a non-refundable stablecoin payment.  

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Agentic Commerce – I’ve Seen a Lot of “Revolutions”. This One Feels Different.

Hello from Alberta and the Columbia Ice Fields. During the drive I’ve put together a Case study in how Shopify is Building a key piece of the new model. Also drill down on monetization as the Gordian Knot that will determine how Agentic Commerce Operates.

I’ve been in the payments and retail space for almost three decades. I was there for the dot-com boom and bust, the shift from plastic to mobile wallets, the birth of amazon and Google, and the rise of the platform economy. I’ve seen enough hype cycles to fill a library. Each time, we were promised a revolution that would change everything. And while some of those shifts were significant, they were ultimately evolutionary. eCommerce added a channel, mobile created more shopping interactions and more points to influence,  but were mostly the same commercially. 

This time, I have to admit, it feels different. The rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence aren’t just creating a new channel; they are actively dismantling the foundational economic bargain of the internet. The core paradigms I’ve operated on for my entire career is being invalidated in real-time.

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The Next GREAT RETAILER CONSOLIDATION? 

Can retailers resist AI Platforms? I don’t think so..

Agentic Commerce is in a state of flux. While the AI platforms provide a glimpse of what conversational commerce will look like, most aren’t able to complete a transaction. 

Shopify and OpenAi are leading the way in creating a best in class integration that will change all that (see overview). For the millions of merchants on Shopify’s platform, participating in the conversational AI revolution will become as simple as flicking a switch. Shopify is handling the backend (real-time product data/inventory, payment and checkout). I love Shopify; their execution is consistently flawless, and I have no doubt this will be another seamless, successful product launch.

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