Anything that a human can do with a computer, an agent can also do with a computer.

We can now automate the commerce process.

These things that I had to have, even being, type a bunch of stuff, or at least speak it,

now that part can be automated.

That's incredible.

Long term, there's really mind-melting questions.

Like, what is an app if your agent can grab everything behind the hood that your app used to grab

for you? Do you need to use the Amazon app? Maybe the Amazon app sucks compared to just asking your

agent to do all the homework, read all the reviews, show me the pictures I care about. You know what I

like. Isn't that better?

All right. Hey, everybody. I'm here with Eddie Lazarin, CTO of A16 Z Crypto, No, Levine,

investment partner here at A16Z Crypto, and Sam Ragsdale, former A16C crypto teammate and current

founder of the startup merit systems, who's working on a project

called Agent Cash that we're going to dig into a little bit. But before we get into that,

I want to set the context here. All the stuff that's going on with agents right now is very

hard to keep track of if you're not paying extremely close attention to it all the time 24-7.

In fact, like, I've heard somebody describe it that you basically need to be unemployed

to stay on top of everything that's happening because the pace is wildly fast and only accelerating.

So what should we know about the state of the world today?

Where are we? What's happened? Sam, do you want to kick us off since you are building and in the thick of it?

There's a taxonomy I like to start with that I stole from Eric Ripple that was one of the creators of X402 at Coinbase and now helps run the X402 Foundation by the Linux Foundation. The taxonomy splits it into one conversational commerce. This is checkout in Chad Chb.T. This is like, you know, you go on to Chatsyptee and you say, like, I'm a male that lives in the West Village and I go to Equinox. I want new shoes to fit in with my peers. And then, you know, it's very empathetic. And it comes up with a great Nike result result and then you buy it. And then there's sort of this other thing which is delegating money to an agent to spend on your behalf to do to do some work. I think the conversational commerce thing is definitely happening. There will be checkout in ChatGBT, BT, check out in Gemini, check out in Claude and whatever the next 10 frontier models that come out are.

That will be a great experience. It'll be great for consumers. They'll find better things. Great for merchants. They'll have better conversion rates. It'll be great for the platforms. They'll be able to take 5 to 10 percent, sort of like the new era of Google shopping. If you're familiar with that progression. And then there's sort of this other world where agents are fairly limited on their capabilities. There's certain things that your chatbots can do, but a lot of people get to their agents and they type in, you know, I'd like to do something hard like I'd like to do outreach for sales. And the agent will say, I actually don't know how to do that. I don't have access to any of that information. And it's very helpful if your agent has some money, has some balance,

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