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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Governance in Payments

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Long blog – Paid Content

Executive Summary

I’ve been writing about governance, trust, transaction costs and payments for a long time. In my view THE KEY to understanding how stablecoins, agentic, DeFi, Open Banking, tokenization and other payment innovations is governance. I seem to be the only one writing about it, so I don’t see a reason to stop now. Governance is the BIGGEST competitive moat for Visa and Mastercard, and its also the heart of their biggest break out growth opportunity. If you thought AI was transformational, radically reducing transaction costs (TCE per Nobel work of Ronald Coase) will dwarf it. In fact the monetization of AI is a Gordian knot of governance issues (see Agentic Commerce and Governance). 

Today I’m expanding on “value exchange” governance with 5 core themes.

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Agentic Commerce Economics and Governance

The “Agentic Era,” promises to revolutionize commerce and customer experience by automating complex purchasing tasks. Agentic’s transformative potential is constrained by the lack of clearly defined shared economic models. 

While the vision of a decentralized Web 3.0 remains unfulfilled, the Agentic Era presents its own set of complex economic questions regarding value creation, distribution, and governance. This blog explores the challenges in establishing shared economic models for agentic commerce by taking a look at Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) and Network Theory to analyze the interplay among consumers, merchants, AI agent platforms, and other stakeholders. We address issues of value attribution, data monetization, trust, risk allocation, permissions and the necessity for robust governance structures beyond mere technical interoperability.

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Commercial Models for AI Agents

Short Blog.. but core to a new series that will attempt to address this strategic question

I find it hard to believe that anyone could keep up with the daily technical updates in AI, the pace of innovation is truly astounding. Given the completion of my recent agentic commerce survey, I thought I’d provide a few of my thoughts on the uncertainties surrounding the economics associated with AI agentic architectures.  While the technology is fascinating, the market operation of AI and Agents is nascent. How is value measured? How will it be monetized?  Who has the pricing power?  How will this impact existing markets, systems and participants? My perspective here is based upon my experience in networked businesses, but even more so in measurement (as CEO/Founder of Commerce Signals).

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Random Thoughts – Modularity and Trust

Trust in a transaction. In another one of my favorite books  (Design Rules: modularity) there exists the concept of trust between physical components of an integrated system. This book stands in contrast to Nobel Economists’ work in defining the “Firm” and organizational boundaries in Transaction Cost Economics (TCE). But the technical theory of modularity is amazingly consistent with the concepts of “boundaries” in TCE. In modularity, there are 4 core rules for separating technical components:

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