Shownotes
Episode 2: "Two Economies, Not One"
Stripe says it's building the agentic economy. So does Coinbase. So does Fetch.ai. They're not building the same thing. They're not even building in the same category.
This episode unpacks the taxonomy that most people in the space are missing. When Stripe builds agent payments, the human still holds the credit card — that's Category A, commerce for humans. When Fetch.ai builds autonomous agents that own wallets and trade with each other — that's Category C, an economy of agents. These aren't two flavors of the same idea. They require incompatible infrastructure. Different identity models, different settlement layers, different dispute resolution, different everything.
We map the full landscape — five categories, fifty-one published definitions, two fault lines — and introduce settlement neutrality: the five formal properties any settlement layer must satisfy to support autonomous agent commerce, regardless of whether it runs on a blockchain or a database. Eleven out of twelve Category C approaches assume crypto. One doesn't. That ratio tells you the debate hasn't happened yet.
If you've been nodding along to "agentic economy" without asking "which one?" — this is the episode that splits the atom.
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