A Chainlink co-founder said on stage that if his AI ever suggested a $450 pair of running shoes, he’d shut the whole thing off that day. Everyone’s talking about AI that can spend money. Buy stuff, move cash, pay bills. Nobody’s asking the boring question: who decides how much the AI is allowed to spend? That was the real story of this panel. Here’s what I took from it. 1. The old fight is over Three years ago the debate was whether banks would ever touch blockchains. @SergeyNazarov pointed out that it got settled while most people weren’t looking. Swift, DTCC and the big clearing houses all run their own versions now. So the question moved. It’s not “will banks use this.” It’s “who’s the customer?” 2. Versions of the future Version one is easy to picture. AI is your hands. A back-office person says “move this collateral,” and the AI does it. Version two is the weird one. The AI becomes its own kind of customer. It makes buying and money decisions with way less human input than we’re used to. He was clear this isn’t happening yet. But at the speed AI is moving, he thinks it’s possible. And if the buyer is a machine, a lot of what companies pour money into stops mattering. Faster page loads. Nicer buttons. A cleaner checkout. A machine doesn’t click buttons. His joke: you know those screenshots of a bank website with startups circling each section they’re replacing? Now the whole page is one arrow pointing at “AI.” Whoever the AI picks wins. Anyone still polishing buttons for humans is playing the old game. 3. The permission slip If an AI has a bank account, what stops it from going wild? His answer is a public registry. Every AI agent gets an ID. Next to that ID sits a file listing what it’s allowed to do. Something like: “this agent can spend up to $100,000 on Mastercard’s agent payment system.” If it asks for $1 million, the system says no, then pings the human. Banks and payment companies check the registry before the AI moves a cent. No entry, no money. Why doesn’t this exist already? Because everyone has to be able to read it and write to it. Banks, AI companies, regular users. Nobody wants one company owning that. He pointed to the LEI, the existing ID system for legal entities, as a promising base. They recently published a report on it, and @chainlink is connecting its systems to theirs. 4. So what’s left for humans? Depends on how good the AI is. His example was shoes again. He usually buys his at 50% off. If the AI finds them at 60% off, why would he ever step in? You treat it like your best employee. You give them more work because they’ve earned it. Then he admitted he might turn into a drooling idiot who can’t do anything, and hoped he’d use the free time to read more books. 5. Where the money goes Elon Musk said money will look totally different by 2036. Sergey thinks that’s a fair date. His reasoning is simple. Digital versions of cash, stocks and funds are growing into a second system next to the old one. The old rails are rigid and won’t change much. The new one only gets better. AI takes the path of least resistance, so it’ll walk down the new one. Behind the scenes, banks are making digital versions of their deposits. Digital dollars like @tether and @circle keep growing. He said Tether already gives people in emerging markets a way to hold dollars without a bank account, and he put the value at tens of billions of dollars. Central banks don’t agree with each other. Europe and the Middle East lean in. The US says no. The messy part is getting all of these to swap with each other. A weak bank’s digital deposit isn’t the same risk as a strong bank’s, or a central bank’s, or a fintech’s. Nobody has fully figured out how to price that. He said that’s what Chainlink is working on now. ethereum:0x514910771af9ca656af840dff83e8264ecf986ca