📍Agent Finance Summit in New York Top 5 takeaways from this morning’s panels @AgenticSummit 1. Agent payments are shifting from “wallets for agents” to actual economic activity The early crypto-AI use case was giving agents wallets so they could deploy contracts, mint NFTs, or trade tokens. The next phase is broader: agents need to pay for APIs, data, compute, enrichment, media generation, procurement, and eventually physical goods. 2. Digital services are the clearest early market The strongest current traction seems to be in digitally native services, especially APIs and data enrichment for GTM. Agents do not need shoes; humans do. But agents do need cloud services, search, inference, data, and paid endpoints to complete tasks. 3. Physical commerce and machine payments are different categories Buying shoes through an agent requires product feeds, checkout, tax, shipping, fulfillment, fraud controls, and payment-method support. That is a different problem from an agent paying $0.04 for an API call. So protocols like ACP/UCP fit conversational commerce, while x402/MPP fit machine-to-machine payments. 4. The standards war matters, but adoption will decide the winners There are multiple emerging standards, but the panel’s view is that the market will likely consolidate around what actually gets used. The winning standards may not be the most elegant; they may be the ones with the most merchants, buyers, liquidity, tooling, and platform distribution. 5. The deeper fight is open agentic commerce vs. closed platform capture The biggest ideological divide is whether the agentic internet becomes permissionless like the web, where any merchant can sell to any agent, or closed like AOL-style marketplaces, where platforms whitelist who can participate. The open-standard camp believes agents should be user-aligned, interoperable, and able to transact freely across the internet. – at Manhattan, NY