AI Agents, Stablecoin Payments, and Open Commerce APIs

getting 100 API keys, having like 100 subscriptions, you have one unified balance, and you pay for what you use.

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All right, we're live. We're here with Shafi doing my best with the pronunciation. I think it works. Uh this is AI Supercycle. It's powered by NEAR. They're our crypto AI partner. And Shafi is here talking about how AI agents are embracing money, how they're using money, what the agentic economy looks like. Uh we had Coinbase Brian [snorts] Armstrong talking about AI fi. And so, there's plenty happening in the space. Shafi, welcome to the show, man. Pleasure to have you.

>> Thanks, Robbie. Thanks for having me, dude.

>> Absolutely. Well, I think it's good uh that we start with just a little bit of an intro. Uh you know, you you've been thinking about the space a lot, newly hired at Circle. So, maybe you could just tell us a little bit about, you know, what you were up to before Circle, and then ultimately how you ended up working on AI fi at Circle.

>> Yeah, dude. Uh long story short, I was actually the AI guy. I was a machine learning engineer for a while. Uh but then 2020, I fell down the crypto rabbit hole. Uh right, we all have that moment, you know, like DAOs, DEXes, all that kind of stuff. Um so, in 2020, I actually started a startup of a journey where we tokenized bonds. Um so, we did that for a while. I'm half German. I would never start a business in Germany ever again. I'm very bearish Europe. So, that's a story for another time. time. time. Um then I did the decentralized stablecoin on Ethereum. That I think at its peak had like $50 million in TVL. Um and then after that, I did smart contracts for Venice AI, uh Erik Voorhees's company. Um and then 2 years ago, I started talking to the guys at Merit, uh Merit Systems, uh decided to move to New York with one backpack, uh which was fun. I liked it so much I stayed.

Uh initially at Merit we did something completely different, but uh around like 8 months ago we were in pivot mode.

Uh and we stumbled into XRouter 2. Right? So, XRouter 2 is this open protocol that allows you to do payments uh over HTTP. Um which for non-technical folks is basically allows you to pay money through APIs uh natively uh over the internet. Um at that point in time, 8 months ago, um when we started looking into XRouter 2, uh there were like a thousand XRouter 2 transactions on chain. And half of them were like Coinbase tests, like basically a test that Coinbase did. Um so, we decided to build XRouter 2 Scan. XRouter 2 Scan is like Etherscan, but for the XRouter 2 ecosystem, which allows you to see all the transfers, all the all the servers that support this new agent e-commerce uh protocol. Uh and they kind of went viral. Um so, it went from a thousand transactions to like a couple of million in a couple of days, and basically jump-started the sole uh agent e-commerce meta uh that we're living in now.

Um I started talking to Circle, you know, a couple of weeks ago. I was always a big uh UCC fan in general. Um so, I'm half German, half Egyptian, and I grew up in Egypt, uh and I saw people like they wanted desperately get access to US dollars. Um I have a lot of my net worth in UCC on Ardor and more for somewhere. Uh so, big fan there. Um also, like uh talked to Jeremy Allaire, and you know, they're like super excited about this. Um because the agent e-commerce, you know, it's like this whole new distribution channel uh for UCC to get UCC out there. I think at this point in time, 99.9% of all agentive commerce happens through UCC. So So, the grand vision is it's pretty obvious to me that agents are going to spend billions of dollars on the internet, right? Um I'm not going to go to amazon.com to buy a mug or something.

I'm going to, you know, hit up my clock code or whatever the equivalent is in 3 years and be like, "Hey, buy me this." And it has access to, you know, a bunch of UCC in the background and and can do a checkout. Um so, that's like the That's like the uh overall agentive commerce uh vision. Well, I'm going to stop there for a sec.

>> Beautiful. Well, there's a lot to dig into. Uh and Chapek, before we continue, could you put put your laptop maybe on a table or something just cuz it's shaking the the camera a little bit. But, I think you you know, you you make a lot of really, really great points because uh you know, these things are starting to explode. And and you know, we've seen how money on the internet like is just becoming ubiquitous with money off the internet. Everything is digital. And you mentioned some of the different avenues in which we can explore these things.

You mentioned X402. You mentioned some of the other ways that agents are adopting these standards. Can you speak to X402? Let's start there because obviously, you know, we're seeing how agents are now using credit cards, you know, some people are choosing to give them their own wallets versus give them permission to access your, you know, typical hot wallet. We'll talk about some of the other venues in which people can start to leverage agents and give them access to money. But, let's start with X402, why you feel it's so important, and and how the progress with X402 is going.

>> Yeah, 100%. Um so, let's uh let's just envision, you know, a world where we currently live in. Um you don't have native You didn't have native payments on the internet. Um so, actually 402 is like an HTTP status code uh that people put in like they find like 30 years ago. So, that wasn't the HTTP spec like 30 years ago and it was never used. It was never used before just because you couldn't do it through like credit cards and debit cards. Um so, that's something that's uniquely enabled by by UCC and stable coins in general. Um the way it's it's used right now is um most people use it to pay for digital goods. So, just imagine you're in inside cloud code or cloud desktop and you need access to the Twitter API or you need access to the Apollo API or you need access to the LinkedIn API. How it would work right now is you would go to Apollo, get an API key, set up your MCP locally, and that's how you access it.

Which sucks because now you need an API key for every single service that you want your agent to get access to. Um in this X42 in this X42 world, you have one unified balance, one wallet that can be a hot wallet, that can be a circle wallet, that can be any wallet, can be a preview wallet, whatever. And now you have access to say every single paid API on the internet that supports that protocol. So, so the way to think about Robbie is there there two different visions for agentic commerce. One is um you're going to chat GPT, you need to talk to Sam Altman, and be like, "Hey, I want to get my API into chat GPT." And if you don't have the cloud or you know, if even if you have the cloud, it'll probably take you like 1 year, you know, like probably $100,000 in lawyers' fees, you know, to get like enterprise agreements, all that kind of stuff.

Uh and probably not going to happen, especially for the long tail of APIs. The the vision that we have at Circle is this open agent e-commerce vision. Which is any API provider can implement these APIs and can implement like XRO 2 and these open agent e-commerce protocols and now your agent with one unified balance has access to your API. So that's that's the that's the vision. Instead of like get getting 100 API keys, having like 100 subscriptions, you have one unified balance and you pay for what you use.

>> Yeah. Very cool. Okay, and so we imagine that this is going to reshape the way that we're interacting with some of these online businesses. I mean, I I'm already, you know, asking ChatGPT when, you know, I'm looking to make a purchase like which one should I purchase, but then I'm going and making the purchase, inputting my payment details and whatnot. And so what you're saying is that there's effectively like this hub-and-spoke model where now XRO 2 becomes the standard and that is what ends up communicating to each of these protocols, but you're still saying there's an adoption curve. If I'm hearing you correctly, it's still on each of these services. Like Amazon, for instance, has to adopt XRO 2. Like they have to integrate XRO 2 into their payment rails. Is that correct and and how do you go and make sure that the adoption happens at all of these service providers?

>> Robin, I actually spent a lot of time on like just, you know, like BD work forward to put engineering work to get these API providers on board. Um [snorts] and there are actually two ways uh about getting an API behind XRO 2. There is like a native integration. So it's like I talked to Twitter, I talked to LinkedIn and they're like, "We're so excited about this. We're going to integrate this natively." Which is just going to take them about a little bit of like engineering cycles. The other way is you set up a dedicated XRO 2 server. You just need one API key and you're good to go. So at So at back at Merit, for example, we had it down to 1 hour. So I talked to one potential API provider. I think the last one I did was an obscure flower API provider in the Midwest somewhere. So that's a flower API that you can call and gets you flowers delivered anywhere in the US.

And they were excited about it. They don't have the engineering expertise though. So they're like, "Hey, here's an API key and I'm going to wrap this for you." Literally takes me 1 hour. And now your cloud code, you know, has access to flowers and you can send it to your wife or a girlfriend or whatever. So that's how the integration works. It's It's very It's very straightforward, very simple, and very fast.

>> Very cool. And so this is starting to become the standard for how really service providers, retailers are starting to integrate agentic payments. Maybe you can just speak to how Circle fits into this because this is a little bit more broad, you know, the category as a whole. How does Circle, you know, integrate? Obviously it becomes a better foothold for USDC market share in the agentic economy, but what is Circle's role in this? And then how does Circle monetize this from a business perspective?

>> Yeah, so so at Circle we have a whole agent stack. So we call that the agent stack and the agent stack is for developers, consumers, and merchants. So this is infrastructure for merchants to put their API bundle for two, for customers to call XYO two. So it's basically we give your cloud code a wallet. You know, we give your cloud code a public key. Now you can have access to USDC and can pay for those. And our motivation behind that at the end of the day is just make sure agent commerce happened happens with with USDC because if you think about it, USDC was made for this. Like just instant settlement, no fees, you know, in comparison to like credit fee, your credit card fees, all that kind of stuff. So, we provide the infrastructure to make sure we get as many people on the demand side and on the supply side on this open agency commerce.

>> Very cool. Okay, so it's effectively a marketplace here. You know, supply and demand, you know, if there's more agents that are spending, there's more demand for these services and there's more demand for agents to make these payments, uh we're going to end up seeing that reciprocated in the market.

>> Yes, it's a very very classical very classical two-sided marketplace. Yes.

>> And and yeah, please go ahead.

>> No, no, go for it. Go for it.

>> I was just going to ask how far along are we do you think? You know, it's obviously still extremely early, but when it comes to building out, you know, the channels for agents to make these payments, how far along are we? How much more progress? What is the biggest bottleneck to integrating more on? Is it the supply side or the demand side at this point? Which one needs more focus?

>> Yeah, it's it's a great question. I think on the on the supply side, we're we're pretty good just because it's so easy to put your API behind X for 2. So, if you go to the Circle marketplace or to X for 2 scan and you type in any any famous API that you can think of, there is a very high chance that there's an X for 2 server that supports that API. Um the a lot of work is on the demand side. And the demand side is hard for two reasons. First of all, for non-technical people or non-crypto people, it's just a lot of work to get cloud desktop set up, to get an MCP set up, up, up, >> Right.

>> um to get a wallet set up. Like these are people that are like, "What What even is a stable coin?"

>> Right.

>> Right? The the the second challenge is uh on terms of the UCC side, uh the on-ramps. The on-ramps are just they're still too much friction.

>> Mhm.

>> So, for example, I have a German debit card, it doesn't work here. I live in New York, most on-ramps don't work here. Um not only for uh but especially on the business side. So, business is getting UCC very hard. We're working very hard on this to make this uh to make this easier. We have a bunch of on-ramps that are very good. Uh but that's it. That's the biggest challenge. Like, get to the demand side, get uh get get UCC in people's hands so they can play around with it. Um once you get there, it's actually an amazing experience.

>> Mhm.

>> So, uh once you have, you know, an MCP that supports these X12 resources, you can do amazing things. Like, you can you can buy things uh on Amazon through X12. You can buy domains through X12. And you have access to all the all the APIs uh that that are out there. And it's all pay-per-request. You don't have a single subscription to anything.

>> And what is for someone who's a little bit less technical out there, what is the process to integrate an MCP, in particular this X402 MCP, into their Cloud, you know, Cloud code or their Cloud account? What is the process like?

>> Yeah, it's literally uh you go to you go to our page, you copy a skill, you put it in your terminal or your Cloud desktop or wherever your agent lives. And and we'll figure out and we'll get it started for you. It's very it's very easy to get to get it started.

>> Okay. Okay.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. >> Mhm.

>> The harder problem is is getting UCC actually.

>> Okay. And so, for someone who's a retail, you know, uh person here and they want to make, you know, payments online, you know, they do they they first need an agent? So, they need to deploy some sort of like Iron Claw or Open Claw instance?

>> So, there there are different ways. So, yes, if you have your existing cloud code setup or Codex or Cursor, then you would do it there. But, actually that like the one of the last things I built back at Merit was something called Poncho. Um and Poncho is cloud code, but it's in the web. And we abstract away um all the like super agentic technical stuff, all the stable coin stuff. Uh and it's probably the easiest way for non-technical people to to get a feel of this open agentic commerce vision.

>> You can just go to Poncho. It'll help you deploy the agent, and the agent will have MCP enabled X402 stable coin payment access.

>> It already It already has the agent. It's just cloud code in the background. It already has a wallet, everything. It You just need to sign up.

>> Wow, very cool. Okay, and as far as you know, those who are just on, you know, Claude or just on ChatGPT, have you or Circle considered going directly to, you know, Anthropic or going directly to ChatGPT OpenAI and saying, "Hey, we have this service. It's battle-tested. We've done the audit. We We think it should come out of the box with, you know, a ChatGPT subscription or a Claude subscription?" Have you considered, you know, approaching these businesses and and starting the integration process so that they don't have to use any third-party servers?

>> Um yes. So, actually I think like 2 weeks ago, uh and and by the way, just for context, I haven't officially joined Circle yet. Like it hasn't been an Obviously, I talked to the team a lot. Um but uh I know some of the people on the team, they just had a presentation with uh with Anthropic, for example. Um and they were very You know, it's it's it's it's a it's a magical moment. It's a magical moment when uh And And to be fair, like I've been in crypto for a while now. It doesn't happen a lot when you that magical move like crypto people. Um but yeah, once you have like cloud code set up and you buy something on Amazon uh through cloud code, uh it's just a magical moment. Like it immediately clicks where it's like this this makes sense.

>> I'd imagine that Anthropic hearing this presentation from Circle about how their agents in Claude or in, you know, uh these these models can directly make purchases. This has got to be like light bulbs going off because this is a revenue opportunity. Like we see in decentralized exchanges, you know, uh front-end fees or different, you know, maybe just one basis point, two basis points as a fee for, you know, going and helping to execute that transaction. I'd imagine OpenAI or Anthropic can charge, you know, a few basis point fee on top of whatever you're, you know, I'm buying something for $12 on Amazon. All right, it's $12.02, you know? And that 2 cents goes to Anthropic. They do this across trillions of transactions every week. It is I mean, it's a massive potential revenue driver for these frontier model companies.

>> Thing that I want to avoid probably and this is basically my mission is I want to avoid that OpenAI builds their OpenAI agentic commerce thing or Anthropic builds their agentic commerce thing. Rather like the vision that I have is it's one open public standard, like the open internet, but for agentic commerce. And once you've integrated it once, now OpenAI, Anthropic, or any other agent that has access to your API. So, uh yeah.

>> I think that that vision makes a ton of sense and I think especially us, you know, in this industry, like we align with that vision most. But, you know, as these things start to get played out and, you know, they start to reach some sort of product market fit. It it someone made this analogy actually recently when it came to the open weight models and the frontier models. How this starts to look like Android and Apple. Like people want the verticalized clean UX, very convenient stack. And then on the other [snorts] hand, yeah, the open weight is going to be maybe you know, 10% or 5% or 1% the cost. It's much much more affordable and it's maybe, you know, just a little bit less intelligent. And I could understand or see, you know, an open standard for agentic commerce that's kind of like Android. Anyone can adopt it. It's open.

It's it's, you know, essentially free standard. But then there might be a more integrated payments stack into, you know, directly part of the chat GPT or the Anthropic experience. And that is kind of like the Apple experience. And people are willing to pay for that level of convenience. But maybe you can just talk about why you think it's likely or unlikely and why you think it's more important that we build out this open standard and this open experience.

>> Yeah, I hope it's I hope it's not going to turn turn into a 30/70 percent split. Uh I I hope like the vision that I have is So, if you go back 30 years, um you had like the AOL internet and you had like the Mosaic open internet, right? And the open internet won. Like it's 100%. Not even 99.999, it's just 100%. Like the AOL vision of the internet doesn't exist anymore. Um and that's good. If we lived in that world, you would have someone like Mark Zuckerberg begging AOL to host facebook.com, which would be, you know, which sucks. Which sucks. Um so, I hope it's I hope it's going to turn into that where it's just uh it's the it's the equivalent to HTTP which powers the the global internet. But the same same thing for agentic commerce. It's a native way It's a native way to do payments on the internet instantaneously with basically no fees uh through stablecoins.

>> Is there any sort of uh applications that you're very excited about? Because what you're talking about this open standard, this open protocol on the internet, the native way of doing these things, it implies that now we're going to see applications built on top because anyone is able to build with these native open protocols in mind. What do you think? Anything that you're particularly excited about that you think can now be built once we have this standard?

>> Yeah, so one thing I'm very I'm very uh I'm very interesting in in this for for example is uh plan my trip. Like I'm going to Paris for a week. Now, right? Here like I don't know, 2,000 bucks I want to spend. And your agent goes off and and books everything.

>> Yeah.

>> Books your flight. It books your hotel. It It does a restaurant reservation. So, you can do restaurant reservations through X 402.

>> So, yeah.

>> Uh basically sets sets all of that up uh for you. Um So, so that's like one use case that I'm always thinking about that would be awesome. Um right now, it it's a lot of like single step thing. So, it's like look up Shuffl on Twitter. Or go to LinkedIn and and look at the you know, most viral most viral LinkedIn posts about agentic commerce, stuff like that. But what I'm really excited about are are these, you know, you have this high-level goal and then your agent goes out with like this unified balance and spends spends for a lot of things to make that high-level goal possible.

>> Mhm. I just saw some data come in actually as we're talking. It says AI agents have initiated 16.2 million transfers via X 402 protocol over the last 30 days. Base led with 9 and 1/2 million transfers, and then Polygon with about 5 and 1/2 million. And so, this is just entirely fueled by people connecting MCP servers to their agents and just using it for transactions. Is it Is it And it it's not just transactions on chain, is it? Is it entirely on chain, or eventually we are going to see XFOWT expanded beyond blockchain and stablecoins and into like fiat hot rails, or are Do you think this is capped by stablecoins right now?

>> So, so right now, right now it's all stablecoins. Um so, so there are two there are two protocols right now in Open Agent to Commerce. And so, the first one is XFOWT that we talked about, which was originally defined by Coinbase. Um and then you have something called MPP. Uh and MPP comes from Stripe at Temple Paradigm. Um and MPP actually allows you to do the same thing, but with credit cards or debit cards. Um so, you so you have that path path as well. Um which works which works great for like big-ticket purchases, right? So, it's actually kind of funny like I, you know, I'm European. I never owned a credit card in my life. It's kind of crazy when I say that here because people love their credit cards, you know, like Well, if you want to book a flight, you want to use a credit card because of the cash back, the credit card points. I actually don't know 100% how that stuff works because I've never used it. But, all I know is people want to use their credit cards for a big-purchase uh items. Uh On the other hand, for like microtransactions, digital goods, APIs, you have like there is no other way around a stablecoins. Uh but, hopefully hopefully even the big uh

ticket purchases uh will be made through uh USDC as well just because it's, you know, lower fees, instant settlement, all the stuff we love about stablecoins.

>> And so, tell me about how XFOWT is able to facilitate like restaurant reservations because that doesn't There's no stablecoin transfers that are changing hands. Like, how is X402 able to facilitate this?

>> Yeah, so um so, there is uh Resy, right? Resy is the big one here in New York that people use.

>> Resy and OpenTable, yeah.

>> Yeah, so someone uh basically signed an agreement with Resy and we're like, "Hey, give me an API key. I'm going to put it behind X402." Uh and basically, you can call into that server and be like, "Hey, here are like $5 or 1 cent or whatever they they need for a reservation." You pay that, you get a reservation back through Resy. So, that's That's basically how it works. It's uh You know, open agentic commerce is a big word, but in the end, it's a very, very simple concept. It's You pay for APIs on the internet.

>> Yeah. Yeah. And right now, a lot of those APIs are just like monthly subscriptions, right? But, you anticipate that this is going to be per call?

>> Yes. Uh so, So, right now, it's per call. So, so, the big the big benefit is, "Hey, I I need access to Apollo data." Or I need access to Twitter data. You don't need to set up anything. You don't need an API key. You don't need a subscription. You don't even need to sign up anywhere. You just have access to it. And And you're going to spend like 1 cent to get like Shafu zero access followers or whatever.

>> Yeah. Wow. This is This is very, very cool. I think I mean, look, I'm still yet to hook this up. I think I need to go uh to Poncho. I need to do this just I'll just do this through the browser, sign up, and then bam, everything is integrated. And I I take it I can connect my Claude account or my ChatGPT account to Poncho and it'll everything is integrated.

>> Yeah, so so, if you have your own agent set up, it's the MCP route. If you want the easiest way to play around with that, it's uh it's Poncho.

>> Very cool. poncho.com?

>> It's tryponcho.com.

>> tryponcho.com. All right. I'm going to try it after this. Shafu, thank you so much, man. Really appreciate it and uh would love to have you back. Uh good luck, have fun with Circle if you you know do continue there and uh we will uh we will talk to you very soon as the agentic economy continues to develop.

>> Awesome, Robby. Thank you for having me. Talk soon.

>> Absolutely. See you again soon. Thanks, Shafu.