Tag Archives: Stablecoin

MPP Phase 2 Live – Ask Tom Goes Agentic

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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”

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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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Stablecoins Are Not Free — Why They Are A RAIL in Consumer Payments

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There’s a narrative running through payments circles right now that goes something like this: stablecoins will replace card rails because they’re cheaper, faster, and programmable. Stripe makes acceptance easy. Card networks are too slow to innovate. Machine-Machine payments need programmability. GENIUS Act passed. The future is obvious.

I’ve been writing about stablecoins for over two years, from the case for stablecoin as a trust platform to the ECB’s monetary sovereignty alarm. And I keep coming back to the same conclusion: stablecoins are not a replacement for cards, but rather another rail with cards retaining their role as the layer of abstraction for multiple networks (as they do today). They will do well where cards don’t play (micropayments, B2B and uncarded markets).

Here’s why (and why that matters more than you might think).

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Stablecoins and Monetary Policy: The ECB Confirms What Italy Said Last Year

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The ECB published a study today warning that stablecoins could erode retail deposits across the eurozone and undermine the effectiveness of monetary policy. The finding is notable — not because it’s new, but because it’s taken this long for the institution to officially say it.

As I related last May, Italy’s Finance Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti made exactly this argument, warning that the displacement of traditional bank deposits by dollar-denominated stablecoins represented a direct threat to European monetary sovereignty. His remarks were largely dismissed at the time as political protectionism. The ECB’s study vindicates the concern. The mechanism is straightforward: if depositors move funds from bank accounts into stablecoins, banks lose the deposit base that anchors their lending capacity — and the ECB loses its primary transmission channel for monetary policy. Rate changes simply don’t land the same way when the money isn’t sitting in a regulated deposit account.

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Stablecoin Rewards’ Last Hope – Clarity Act

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Summary

  • Clarity Act stuck in Senate on Stablecoin Rewards, 70% chance of passage this year
  • Stablecoin yield (or anything that resembles it) goes away, and rewards look more like what you have on your Visa card. Coinbase pulled out because of crypto restrictions in the bill (not stablecoin).
  • Industry will likely pivot to sweep, and Stableocin becomes just another rail, which will require consumer and merchant adoption, without the big “draw” of balance rewards. Thus, balances stay in transactional and interest-bearing accounts, and friction increases w/ stablecoin payments.
  • Politics of key players and quotes in blog today.

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 (H.R. 3633) is the last hope for Stablecoin issuers to save rewards. While the bill passed the House with a strong bipartisan vote on July 17, 2025, its progress has stalled in the Senate (as of Feb 2028) with intense disagreements regarding the regulation of stablecoin “rewards” and yield-like incentives.

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2025: The Great Decoupling

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Year-End Payments Recap

Summary: B2B Stablecoin and The End of the Interface Era

As we close the books on 2025, the payments industry finds itself at  a moment that future historians will likely designate as the end of the “Interface Era” and the dawn of the “Agentic Era.” For the past three decades, the digitization of payments has been defined by the migration of human intent from POS to digital screens. From the first e-commerce transaction to the ubiquity of mobile wallets, the fundamental atomic unit of the economy remained the same: a human being, interacting with a graphical user interface (GUI), making a conscious decision to exchange value for goods or services.

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Stablecoin Scenarios

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Summary

The digital asset ecosystem has graduated from a decade of speculative experimentation to a decisive phase of infrastructure modernization. For fifteen years, the discourse surrounding blockchain technology has been dominated by the volatility of crypto-assets, effectively obscuring the underlying utility of the technology. That era has concluded. We are now witnessing the industrialization of the sector, where stablecoins have emerged not as a new form of money, but as a fundamental settlement innovation (see blog).

The GENIUS Act has provided the regulatory clarity required to transition stablecoins from the periphery of finance to its very core. This legislative milestone has catalyzed a geopolitical shockwave, prompting European finance ministers to declare U.S. stablecoins a greater threat to monetary sovereignty than trade tariffs. But while the Genius act codified “trust” in an instrument (reducing settlement risk to stablecoin issuer balance sheet), it does not address disputes and broader governance issues associated with managing participants across diverse processes and regulatory regimes.

The maturation of stablecoins is not a revolution that overthrows established banks and payments system; it is an evolution that upgrades it. The rails are being replaced while the train is moving, and those who understand the mechanics of the new tracks will determine the destination of global capital.

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101 Update: CBDCs, Stablecoins and Tokenized Deposits

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Very short update on the basic differences for the non-payment geeks

The three core constructs of digital value —CBDCs, Stablecoins, and Tokenized Deposits—represent have various degrees of support from banks, central banks, businesses and regulators. Each has different risk and control points.

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Updates from Money 2020

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It was truly fantastic catching up with so many of you in person at Money 2020! It’s clear that payments, AI, and digital assets are accelerating at an unbelievable pace. If you didn’t manage to make it, or if you were too busy grabbing coffee to focus on the news flow, here are my top takeaways from the floor. I hope to see some of you in Miami at Simon’s Fintech Nerdcon!

The core theme I kept hearing is that the future of commerce is moving rapidly toward machine-to-machine (M2M) interactions. As this happens, the role of V/MA networks (governance, economics, trust, identity, and authorization) becomes even more crucial. The technology is the easy part; the governance is the real competitive moat.

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