# Merit Systems' x402scan grows to around 50,000 resources that AI agents can buy

Stableminded, a Stabledash show. Aug 20, 2026. Sam Ragsdale.
https://live.stabledash.com/shows/stableminded/episodes/ex-google-and-a16z-founder-now-building-payments-for-ai-wKgBc34CBEQ

Sam Ragsdale says AI agents will not browse or click on ads, and he wants them to pay their own way with stablecoins at checkouts open to every agent.

Merit Systems, the company led by Sam Ragsdale, says its x402scan registry now lists around 50,000 resources AI agents can pay for, up from about a hundred at launch. Alongside it sits AgentCash, a wallet an agent uses to pay for anything on x402 or MPP.

## Ads stop working for agents

Sam Ragsdale notes that the web set aside status code 402, "payment required", early on, but no payment technology at the time could support it. Instead the internet ran on distraction, and he calls Google search a "$300 billion a year choke point". Agents, he says, "certainly will not get distracted along the way" and probably won't want HTML sites or browsers. He thinks walled gardens built around entertainment will be safer businesses.

## From open source to payments

Ragsdale and Ryan left two years ago to start Merit Systems. They spent about a year on a cap table for open source repositories, but tools like Cursor IDE made it "really hard to tell if contributions were high quality or slop." The team then turned to Coinbase's x402, which had handled about 2000 transactions over six months. x402scan reached 300,000 users in month one, though Ragsdale says "a lot of the early boom there was caused by speculation" from meme coins.

## One wallet, two protocols

AgentCash now covers both x402 and MPP, the equivalent protocol from Stripe and Tempo. Ragsdale says the name comes from cash: a stablecoin settles right away, while cards and ACH take T plus two at best. Agents still struggle with normal checkouts, he says, because merchants carry the fraud risk and build in bot protection.

## What holds adoption back

Sam Ragsdale names on-ramps as the main blocker, since consumers face KYC and businesses face KYB. He says neobanks such as Mercury are building stablecoins in directly, and he pictures "a world where every bank has stablecoins on day one."

Sam Ragsdale wants agents to work for their users, not for advertisers. He points to Amazon Rufus as an assistant tied to an $80 billion a year advertising business. Merit Systems wants every checkout open to every agent, rather than one-to-one deals between AI providers and merchants.

## Key takeaways

1. Sam Ragsdale says x402scan, a registry of things AI agents can pay for, went from about a hundred listings at launch to around 50,000 today.
2. Merit Systems launched the AgentCash wallet, which lets an agent pay over x402 or MPP in USDC on Base, Solana and Tempo.
3. Ragsdale says much of the early growth came from meme coin speculation, and he expects agent payments to grow 100 to 1000x in the next five years.

## Chapters

- 0:00 Cold open and sponsor message
- 1:33 From hardware tinkering to Google ads, crypto and a16z
- 3:51 The 402 status code and the ad-funded internet
- 8:24 Agents break the browser, search and display ad stack
- 13:12 Paid tasks and bot-blocking checkouts stop agents today
- 17:57 Pivot from open source incentives to x402scan
- 21:44 AgentCash gives agents one balance for many APIs
- 27:00 Agent payments could grow 100 to 1000x
- 31:50 Stablecoins offer instant finality for merchants serving agents
- 36:04 Vision for user-aligned agents and open checkouts

## Transcript

**Sam Ragsdale** (0:00)

The universe of agent payments today is very, very small. We're in the first inning. We're talking 100, 1,000x growth in the next five years. The old business model for the internet was distraction, that you could monetize off of a user getting distracted by banner ads or display ads. In the age of agents, agents will use a different search engine, they don't want HTML websites, they don't want a browser, and they certainly will not get distracted along the way.

There's this status code that exists in the browser in networking We now have globally distributed ledgers that can do subcent transaction fees to anywhere in the world in under a second. Why agent cash is called agent cash is because cash is the

**Sam Ragsdale** (0:47)

If you're a merchant transacting with hundreds of thousands of agents and doing millions of dollars of volume a year, stablecoins are really compelling. There's a world of open agenda commerce where every checkout is available to every agent.

**Drew Rogers** (1:05)

Hey, it's Drew. Quick thank you to Altitude for making this episode possible. Altitude is rebuilding business banking for teams on the frontier. They offer the full stack for the modern CFO and founder, a beautifully designed platform for payouts, bill pay, corporate cards, enterprise controls, and so much more. Move money with speed, yield, and total control, all from your stablecoin balance. Operate at Altitude. If your business is on the frontier, your finances should be too. You can learn more at altitude.xyz.

**Host** (1:33)

We have the illustrious Sam Ragsdale from Merit Systems. Excited to dive in today. Great to meet you. I know we have St. Louis in common. I don't know if I said that. I grew up there.

**Sam Ragsdale** (1:43)

Nice.

**Host** (1:43)

I was almost a WashU guy.

**Sam Ragsdale** (1:45)

Nice.

**Host** (1:45)

Okay. So excited to dive into your story. Really pumped to hear about what you're building in the world of agentic commerce. Ooh, getting buzzy. But take us on the journey a little bit. You said earlier, you said you've been a builder from the beginning. You've always been a builder. Tell me about that. What did that look like when you were actually young and then how has that kind of evolved the course of your career?

**Sam Ragsdale** (2:08)

Yeah, so I've always loved building stuff since I was very, very young. You know, it was the obvious stuff like Legos and RC cars and all that stuff. I got into robotics like most kids at my age and then got into 3D printing in high school. I really liked building physical stuff. I built an electric longboard before the Boosted Board came out. Upgraded that over the course of college. Eventually, it went 42 miles an hour. The Boosted Board topped out at 22, so it was...

**Host** (2:32)

Yeah, did you ever have any...

**Sam Ragsdale** (2:33)

Yes, it was extremely dangerous. It's a terrible idea. I still have it. The battery is pretty cooked. I ended up building the battery myself because at the time the battery technology wasn't great. You couldn't import great batteries. But yeah, I loved building stuff. At some point along the way in college, I realized there was no Andoril at the time. There wasn't this great rebirth of industrial, of American manufacturing. And so there was not great, there weren't very fun mechanical engineering jobs.

It was looking like I would probably be spending my 20s in a Nevada desert working on landing gear. And so instead I decided to get into software, which I enjoyed. You get a lot of leverage in software. You can build more stuff as an individual. And then got my first internship at Amazon Web Services with my co-founder and CTO, Ryan. We lived together there in a tiny little shack in Seattle. He ended up going back to Amazon Web Services.

I went to Google, worked on ads, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a second, but is the first incentive model for the internet. The one that scaled it for the entirety of my adult life. And I think is being set to be disrupted right now. And then got into crypto in 2021 doing MEV. I went over to a16z to work on their venture fund. I did sort of all the technical investing stuff deep in the stack. L1s, L2s, zero-knowledge virtual machine scaling technology. Maybe we'll get into that as well.

And then had the knack to get back after it and start building again and raised about two years ago now.

**Host** (3:51)

Amazing. Okay. Yeah. Double clicking on a couple of the threads there. Love that you lived in a tiny apartment as a college kid with your co-founder. That's a great origin moment. But then talk a little bit about the, you said what scaled the original internet, the incentive structure that scaled the original internet, web2 land, Google ads. Lay the foundation if you're saying this moment is ripe for disruption of that style of internet and Merit Systems is doing some of that disruption.

Give us a history lesson on the old way of doing things in terms of the incentives and what is scaled and the sort of incumbent marketplace there.

**Sam Ragsdale** (4:27)

So to go back to the beginning of time, or at least time as I know it, I was born in 1997. Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen, and a bunch of others were working on the early internet. And fiber had just been built out and the infrastructure was being built out, but it was still extremely expensive. The browser was just coming online and it was a little bit unclear why The open internet should exist. Why somebody should put up a server and then have any user on earth be able to hit that thing?

Because servers were extremely expensive at the time. Like we're talking half a million dollars a year to run. There was no open source software. You had to license the software. There was no data centers or cloud as we know it, you know, like on demand pricing. So you had to get real estate and put a box in it. And then the networking was extremely expensive too.

And so the idea that anybody in the world and maybe everybody in the world, 7 billion people would be able to access all the other stuff in the world was ridiculous. That would be extremely expensive. Like, why would you pay for that? And so in the early days of the internet, they put an error status code, which means like I'm not returning a good request called 402, which said payment required. Basically, like if you as a client want to hit my server that shows my recipe book or whatever, Please pay me.

But unfortunately there was no payment technology at the time that could support microtransactions or actually macrotransactions either. They were still figuring out credit cards on the internet too. So they moved on and like didn't worry about it. Google search happened a few years later and then you could type stuff in and it would give you all of the web pages on the internet.

And then of course they figured out to put ads in there as well and created one of the best business models of all time, which is that if you have the entry point to all of the information and goods and services in the world, You can monetize that choke point extremely well. And so that's a $300 billion a year choke point or something like that.

**Host** (6:04)

It's like the ultimate... You mentioned Munger earlier. I'm thinking about Warren Buffett's obsession with toll bridges. It's the ultimate toll bridge. Yes.

**Sam Ragsdale** (6:12)

They very much would not want you to refer to it that way, and they very much would not want you to refer to it as a monopoly, which I've done neither of, but...

**Host** (6:20)

All love to Alphabet. They wouldn't want you to refer to it that way.

**Sam Ragsdale** (6:24)

No. And they certainly wouldn't want you to refer to it that way in a court. But it's an extremely good business model. $300 billion a year. I worked on Google Ads on the advertiser platform. And it seems to keep scaling in a way that nobody would have expected. Like in 2016, I was reading the old The Internet Trends Report, which VCs at the time were really excited about. And I think that Google's revenue, or I think all of internet advertising revenue had hit $60 billion that year.

And the report was like, I just don't know if it's going to scale anymore. Like it's got a plateau at some point. And of course it didn't. It continued to grow, one of the largest business models ever.

**Host** (6:58)

Yeah, it makes me think of the first trillion dollar valuation. It's like, oh, there can't, you know, what does that even mean? Now we've got a trillion dollar man. There will be many four minute mile moments. But that's the, you saw up close and personal, you took us, I love you took us to the evolution of like the early internet. There's an X402 pin that we'll have to put in there. You saw this incredible business model that has scaled this version.

The Internet and is still in existence, although, of course, is being challenged as Google native interaction is at risk.

**Sam Ragsdale** (7:30)

Yeah.

**Host** (7:30)

If you will, in

**Sam Ragsdale** (7:31)

2026. I would say actually Google is doing a great job at adjusting. I wouldn't say necessarily Google will be in a bad spot, but maybe ads as a business model. So it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. I think the last piece there is that in summary, condensing a lot of complicated topics, the old business model for the internet was distraction, that you could monetize off of a user getting distracted by banner ads or display ads or something like that.

And so if you're looking for a recipe, You might see you know the shoes that you saw three days ago and that merchant that wants to sell you those shoes that advertiser is willing to pay lots of money to monetize that interaction and

**Drew Rogers** (8:05)

the nice

**Sam Ragsdale** (8:05)

thing is also it's a really low friction business model as well there's three parties involved you have the consumer that's looking for maybe a recipe you have the publisher that is hosting the recipe and then you have the advertiser and you have google in the middle and the money only needs to flow between the advertiser to google to the And the user doesn't need to show up with anything. And so it's extremely low friction. It's scaled. It's scaled really, really well.

So old business model for the internet was distraction. And maybe the stack, the way that I would think about the internet stack that has existed my entire adult life is you have a browser that shows generic HTML web pages. And then you have a search engine that allows you to find all of the web pages and go through them.

And then when you click through to one, there will be a display ad that if there is no relationship between if the publisher is not monetizing directly through the So like Amazon, for example, they sell to the user. And basically that entire stack doesn't make sense in the age of agents. In the age of agents, agents will probably use a different search engine, they probably don't want HTML websites, they probably don't want a browser, and they certainly will not get distracted along the way.

And so that incentive model is what created the free and open internet as we know it. The 10 trillion token data set that humanity put all of their information online. That, ironically, eventually created the LLM. That incentive model is now completely bricked because people want to use agents for all of their research, discovery, and increasingly commerce and execution. Sam

**Host** (9:25)

Ragsdale, Same incentive model that social media companies have used? Do you see it as fundamentally the exact same model in terms of these banners and ads? It's just in a feed or a little bit different there?

**Sam Ragsdale** (9:35)

It's hard to generalize. I think the free and open internet incentive model is the one that I've described. The walled garden one is actually quite different. Walled gardens being Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, etc. Basically, when you're within an authenticated context, you log into that site and they can personalize. I also think that most of the walled gardens are focused on entertainment, people that want to scroll to find something to do, to find something to wear, etc.

And so the monetization channels are slightly different there. And I don't think people are going to use LLMs agents as much for leisure. So the walled garden stuff, I think those business models will be safer. They're a little

**Host** (10:09)

safer, okay. So let's go to the one that's maybe a little less safe. The former mothership who you said is adapting well, but now you have the entry of LLMs, a pretty fast entry in terms of user adoption, wildly fast. And when I think about the introduction of ChatGBT into life and the way that it basically roared past the standard technology adoption curves that we would expect across the world, across ages and various demographics, My mother-in-law uses ChatGPT with the best of them.

You know, we have all kinds of people who are adopting it. And with this sort of mass adoption, as you said, people are seeking out information in different ways. There's a foot in the door. There's an opening towards a more agentic existence. Where do you see opportunity there such that you said, oh, we've got to go chase this. And was this, you were leaving a16z saying that's what we got to chase or it's kind of adopt this new, it's been a few pivots since you've gotten into playing here.

**Sam Ragsdale** (11:08)

Yeah, so two very different questions. Yeah, I

**Host** (11:10)

know. I gave you a couple. Take me on the journey.

**Sam Ragsdale** (11:12)

Yeah, so what I would say is that the entirety of the stack doesn't make sense anymore. Like the way that a user goes about executing information, which is you pull up your phone, you pull up a browser, you go to Google. Google's probably purchased the default search bar in there for $20 billion as well. So you type into the default search bar, it goes to Google, and you click through to get your information and get progressively deeper into the internet through a series of UIs.

I don't think that makes a ton of sense anymore. Increasingly, you'll do your execution through an agent.

**Host** (11:38)

And humans are going to go through that in a very human way, which is very visual. You know, there are certain ways that we would go through it in sequence that maybe is not how an agent would approach it.

**Sam Ragsdale** (11:47)

Yeah, exactly. Like, I think the UIs were created to maximize the amount of information that is transmitted from your device to your brain so that you can make a decision back and forth repeatedly. If you have an agent that can do a lot of that for you, it can take the original intent and then go through all of that. Then the UI doesn't make a ton of sense. The screen doesn't make sense. The website doesn't make sense. And so the way that we've built our entire digital economy probably gets rebuilt in some form.

I don't know exactly what it looks like.

**Host** (12:14)

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I'm rewinding to the early days of personal computation and thinking about moving from command line interfaces to graphical interfaces that were more sort of human friendly. Like Steve Wozniak figuring this out in a garage.

**Sam Ragsdale** (12:28)

Yeah, exactly.

**Host** (12:29)

Now we're sort of going back potentially?

**Sam Ragsdale** (12:31)

Maybe. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a great example, right? Like if you go from, which we're going back to, if you go from the CLI and you have just flat text and monospace font, there's a lot more information density in a well-made UI with, you know, big colors and bold and buttons. And like, you know, when you click something, you get through to a new dimension and really like in the abstract, what you're getting is better transmission of the options on the page and what to do next to the brain.

So you can go back and forth and you can get a task So now we're back in this age of agents and now everything's marked down, everything's text again.

**Host** (13:03)

It doesn't have to be pretty and simple and sophisticated. Maybe there's still elements of a fundamental principle of design there that's helpful, but it's also just a different brain.

**Sam Ragsdale** (13:12)

You specify your intent and then that agent goes and executes it on your behalf as long as it can. And maybe this will be the transition moment. A lot of the things that your intents, the things that you want to execute on the internet actually require money, even today. And so there are the things that you currently research and get information on.

Maybe you go to Wikipedia, maybe you go to a recipe website, maybe you get the sports scores that are currently monetized through The ability to distract the human while you're doing it. If an agent is doing that on your behalf, you know, wants to find the score of the football game this weekend, it won't get distracted by the advertisement for shoes on the side of the page. And then similarly, there's lots of stuff you do on the internet that requires payment, that requires a credit card.

Maybe you want to do something simple like a checkout, or maybe you want to book a flight. Those are things that currently are not built for agents in any capacity, and so an agent just can't do it for you. I probably can't even like search to figure out all the options for shoes that are available to you because that wasn't built for bots and actually was built to block bots.

And then there's harder things that like a hedge fund might want to do through an agent like find me satellite data or drone data on these data centers so that I can speculate on the build out that's going on. These are all things that intuitively you think you should be able to do through an agent. You know, you imagine an agent and they imagine it's AI, so it should be able to do anything.

But there's some fundamental barriers to the way that we built everything over the past 25 years that blocks bots or assumes ads will be able to monetize that no longer make a ton of sense.

**Host** (14:35)

I love it. So I feel like we've kind of teed it up, right? Like it's like, oh, here's the old way. Here's the reasons why it is changing. How are you playing in this game?

**Sam Ragsdale** (14:47)

For sure. So we're starting with very simple primitives. I can't say that I know exactly how it's going to play out. And so we're kind of experimenting at the edge.

**Host** (14:55)

Maybe what makes you, first we'll say just like, why this? For you, you could do many things. You said you're a builder. You've been with some big, amazing groups doing cool stuff at Google and a16z, and we could dive into lots of rabbit holes here. We're in an awesome era. You can work on many things. This is what you're choosing to work on and focus on and hopefully win at. Why this problem?

**Sam Ragsdale** (15:18)

We've gotten to a place in the world where very large tech companies and other producers have immense technology that they can use against the consumer. And so examples of this are that through the walled gardens, you have algorithms that are written by tens of thousands of brilliant engineers to maximize your screen time to get you very excited and addicted to your phone. And then you have another group of 10,000 engineers that's meant to serve the perfect ad so that you click through and buy that thing.

And it's kind of like an asymmetric advantage. These are very, very good algorithms. Before we had the LLM, the majority of the AI spend was on making sure that you would click a button and buy those shoes. And similarly, it's an incentive model that shapes our civilization, the world around us. For the first time, everybody has access to Frontier LLMs, roughly. Do you have fable or not battle that is happening?

But roughly speaking, thanks to capitalism, everybody in the world has access to the best silicon intelligence that exists. Because that is the most profitable thing to do is to distribute the technology as widely as possible.

**Host** (16:17)

Maybe similar to the old internet that it was crazy to distribute freely. Yeah, it's like the

**Sam Ragsdale** (16:22)

common question people ask about, isn't it odd that the richest people in the world use the same phone as you, right? And the answer is like, thanks to capitalism, the most profitable thing to do with an amazing technology is distribute it to everybody so everybody has access to it. The other tailwind that is happening is thanks to open source AI and great work from great technologists all over the world and, you know, a massive bubble in spending, the price of tokens is coming down dramatically.

And so it looks like you'll have Frontier LLMs that get better every year and get 10x cheaper every year. Better every

**Host** (16:51)

month.

**Sam Ragsdale** (16:52)

Better every month, yeah. And hopefully 10x better and 10x cheaper every year. And if that continues to happen, then we'll be in a pretty awesome spot. But I think what this means, what you'll have the ability to do for the first time in my adult life is that every user will have a user-aligned AI. So today, a lot of your goods and services are provided by companies, corporations that are not fully aligned with you.

They're aligned with the person that's paying them, which is the advertiser or the publisher, because that is truly their customer. But for the first time, every human, every consumer could have access to a user aligned AI, one that cares about their preferences, their goals, their budgetary needs, how they want to show up in the world. And you can think about it as like a cybernetic backpack.

for consumerism for the commercial world that we're headed into and in a world where just the big companies get access to this like we had through sort of the advertising era you end up with a bad asymmetry and I think you end up with a less happy population but in a world where everybody has access to a user-aligned AI I think you end up with a much more interesting world and it helps every consumer becomes more educated more effective and I think it's a much more interesting way that this plays out

**Host** (17:57)

Totally. And so about two years ago, you launched Merit Systems. Throwback to the roommate in Seattle.

**Sam Ragsdale** (18:03)

You're together at the time.

**Host** (18:05)

Current CTO.

**Sam Ragsdale** (18:06)

Yeah. So Ryan and I lived together in San Francisco while I was at a16z. He was a fund called Blockchain Capital. I'm sure many of the viewers know as well. We built lots of projects on the side together and, you know, we love building stuff together. And then about two years ago, decided it was time to do the thing, start a company. At the time, we were focused on open source incentives. So we wanted to rewrite how people built in open source.

We effectively wanted to create what looked like a cap table for every open source repository so that you could point money We spent about a year on that. Unfortunately, by the time we got it out, when we started it, Cursor had just came out. So we were using it. I think that means it was like, I guess it launched with GPT-4, which was like the first agentic-ish LLM two years ago, which is such a short time period for how much has

**Drew Rogers** (18:55)

happened. It's crazy.

**Sam Ragsdale** (18:56)

We just started using Cursor, but it was mostly like, you know, make a code edit here and there. You would never use it agentically. You'd use it for like rewrite this for loop to make it smaller or put good comments in or something like that. By the time we launched it and got it out there, I think we're on like GPT 4.5 at this point. And the rules of open source had just been rewritten overnight.

The ability for people to freely contribute to anything and accept code contributions was really messed up by the fact that it was really hard to tell if contributions were high quality or slop. And so open source kind of got railroaded overnight. The whole incentive model collapsed. So then we went back to the drawing boards and we looked at what we were good at. And we were good at agents and commerce. And it looked like there is a subset of the market that would be particularly applicable to stablecoins.

That being sort of this microtransaction category. And so we looked around at sort of the various, all of the prior art in the space, what people were working on. The Coinbase team had been working on this thing called X402 since the spring, about six months earlier. X402, it's very well named, good meme.

Back to the Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen thing earlier, there's this status code that exists in the browser in networking that says payment required, but there was no way at the time in 1997 to actually pay, or much less to pay a microtransaction if you want to pay a cent or two cents. Fast forward 25-ish years, we now have globally distributed ledgers that can do subset transaction fees to anywhere in the world in under a second. And so all of a sudden it made sense.

Coinbase rolled this thing out called X402, allows you to pay a microtransaction for some API resource. But at the time there was about 2000 transactions over six months that had gone across it. And so we asked ourselves, like, what is the biggest thing we could do to push this space forward? And so we launched X402scan, which was a registry of all of the X402 resources, all the stuff that agents could buy. And at the time there was about a hundred things on it.

And then very quickly blew up at 300,000 users in month one, transaction volumes We're hitting tens of millions of dollars, lots of people registering new resources, lots of new developer demand. The caveat that I will make to everybody that has context on X402, and I admit every time very clearly, a lot of the early boom there was caused by speculation.

People were launching meme coins onto X402scan and X402 more broadly, which is not a particularly good way to launch a meme coin, but it did bring in an immense amount of eyeballs. People were really, really excited about it. So we doubled down, we saw, you know...

**Host** (21:13)

Sometimes innovation starts as chaotic play.

**Sam Ragsdale** (21:16)

Yes.

**Host** (21:18)

Or chaotic speculation. Yeah. And then it grows up a little bit over time.

**Sam Ragsdale** (21:22)

Yeah, the way that my old boss Chris Dixon used to refer to this is sort of the innovation price cycle, which is that the first thing that happens usually is there's an uptick in interest and then there's an uptick in price. Yeah. And that brings in lots of developers, which happens slower over some period of time as sort of a lagging indicator. Often the price collapses at that point, but the developers stay around and build the real things that lead to people getting very excited about it.

So, brought in lots of developers, we leaned in, we made a lot of improvements to x402scan. We started the early version of agent cache at that point. So, x402scan is sort of supply side. You can think about it kind of like the Google search of this world. As an agent, you can find which goods and services that you'd like to pay for. As a publisher, a merchant, you can publish goods and services to agents.

**Host** (22:06)

And do you interact with it directly or do you go through an LLM?

**Sam Ragsdale** (22:09)

There is a UI and then it has search that's meant for an agent for your cloud or your chat GPT. So we had kind of the supply side, we built that out and I think as of today there's around 50,000 different resources on there. You should think about it as an app store or the early days of the internet where it's sort of like there's a power, there's a short tail of the high quality resources and then there's a lot of additional stuff. People are kind of like playing around with it, toying around with it.

There's a lot of developers coming in. Shortly after that, we launched Agent Cash One. Agent Cash is a wallet that you give to your agent and it can pay for anything on X402 or MPP. And so data, goods, services, custom merch, you can buy a phone number on there, you can send SMS, you can buy an email inbox, you can rent GPUs, you can host a website. The way we think about it is one balance access to every API on the internet. And that's a little bit aspirational at this point, but we're slowly working towards that.

Shortly thereafter, we launched MPPScan. MPP is the equivalent of X402 by the Pempo and Stripe guys, and Agent Cash now supports MPP as well. So two protocols, and it supports USDC on Base, Solana, and Tempo across X402 and MPP. Yeah, and we've sort of doubled down and been focused on that since trying to grow the market share there, bring new developers in to build interesting things.

**Host** (23:18)

Yeah, so flashing back just a couple of months, I'm at a very stable conference in San Francisco and agentic, insert word, has started to get thrown around a lot. Agentic commerce, agentic finance, agentic economies. But there's also this question of kind of, What's real? What's not? Sounds like some of this is deciphering that a little bit. Take me through, maybe it's agent cash. What's real right now?

You said some of it's aspirational, but what's real in terms of I could go out and use it or maybe it's for the individual consumer. Is it more institutional? How can we interact with this technology now and maybe where are you going to?

**Sam Ragsdale** (23:53)

The thing that Agent Cash excels at today is for people that are, well, you could be a sophisticated agent user and you want to buy hosting. You want your agent to do more, right? You want it to be able to pay for stuff. You want it to be able to buy stuff in the real world, or maybe you want to buy data to do sales and go to market workflows. In general, one balance access to every API on the internet.

The way that I think about it is two years ago, there were about 50 million people around the globe that knew what an API is and have ever gotten an API key and spent money over using an API. All of a sudden we're at like a billion, right? Two years later, there's a billion people that are able to put into an agent, I would like to find satellite imagery of my house and then hit enter. And of course there's an API for that. There's 10 different APIs for satellite data.

There's APIs for everything, but there was no ability for my fiance, for example, to get access to those APIs. And now you can type into Claude like, you know, I would like to do this thing. Claude can't unfortunately go and pay for that thing. And so we want to give it a way to do machine payments. You want to give it a wallet. Now it can interact with that service directly. It can pay them 10 cents, get access to that satellite photo, and you can move on with the rest of your query.

**Host** (24:56)

And what's true right now in terms of giving Claude or giving GPT your wallet, a wallet, a way to transact, some of that is happening.

**Sam Ragsdale** (25:05)

Yeah, so today, via Agent Cash, you can pay for anything on X402 and MPP. That is a subset of all of the things that you could possibly pay for, for sure. There's about 50,000 different resources on there. You can do most of the Frontier image and video generation via an email inbox, phone number, etc. There's a bunch of weird stuff there. Ironically, what you can't do very well is get through normal checkouts. So if you want to buy a Starbucks coffee for pickup, you can't do that on X402 or MPP today.

And it's very hard for your agent to do that. There's been some efforts...

**Host** (25:34)

It's a classic example, right? Can my agent buy me a coffee? Funny enough, it's like, I don't know if I really want an agent to buy me a coffee. I'd rather have it buy me something else. But you're saying it's difficult. You're stuck there.

**Sam Ragsdale** (25:44)

Yeah, you require the merchants to come online themselves. There's sort of this weird thing that happened that all of the checkout boxes on the web are actually extremely sensitive because of the way that credit cards

**Host** (25:54)

work.

**Sam Ragsdale** (25:55)

The way that credit cards work is that the merchants take all of the risk. If you as a user come and you buy your coffee, you swipe your coffee, it probably doesn't settle to the merchant for about 30 days. So that merchant's basically extending credit to you for 30 days. You then as the consumer can go do a chargeback. You claim that the services provided by the merchants were bad or fraudulent, or you claim that you actually didn't do the payment, right? It was some other guy.

And so as a result of that, the merchant takes all of the risk. There's this big concern in the checkout that you need to make sure that with as high confidence as possible, that the actual person is doing the checkout. And so there's all of this bot protection put into the checkout forms very subtly that make it really, really hard for a chat GPT with computer use or a cloud with computer use to get through that actual checkout.

And so ironically, the things that are the hardest to buy through agentically through Agent Cash or X402 or MPP are the normal things that humans are used to buying all the time. All of the e-commerce stuff, all the commodities, the goods and services. I think that that will shift over the next year. Stripe particularly is doing some really great work here, making more of these checkouts accessible to agents.

**Host** (27:00)

Yeah, okay, so we talked about the old business model and old incentive structure and all of that and how an agent will interact with the internet and with information broadly very differently. I'm curious, you said you saw one of the best business models ever at play. Sometimes people talk about this world of digital assets having some really compelling business models. Laughably good, laughably high profit.

**Sam Ragsdale** (27:23)

Meaning Circle and Tether?

**Host** (27:24)

Yeah. These are who I'm thinking of. What's the business model here? How does this make money? Or is the point like, hey, we're getting in the game, we're winning the distribution now, and then we'll monetize later?

**Sam Ragsdale** (27:35)

I think that if you're in the transaction flow of the way that agents pay, the universe of agent payments today is very, very small. We're in the first inning. But if you extrapolate the ChatGBT adoption chart onto that, you know, we're talking 100, 1000x growth in the next five years. So I think there's a great business model there.

But I also think it creates, to your earlier comment about the previous business model for the internet, I think it creates potentially new avenues for people to monetize, potentially new businesses that couldn't exist before. And so over the last 20 years, news companies have had a very adversarial relationship with walled gardens, for example, with Facebook, with Twitter. Drew Rogers, Sam Ragsdale, BVNK, Stabledash Global, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live.

**Sam Ragsdale** (28:30)

I think there's also other things like in a world where everybody has a user-aligned agent superintelligence on their behalf that's 10x smarter than it is today. You could, for example, take a picture of a molding in your house that's in really bad shape. You could send it off to some manufacturing agent. They could negotiate a perfect price and maybe you send it off to 50 of them or 3000 of them. And maybe some of those are actually in China.

It negotiates that in the background, you end up paying five bucks for it. You have the perfect new repair for your home. And so it's kind of hard to think about, but I think that when you give agents these things that can do super intelligent work on your behalf, access to your bank account and access to act on your behalf, there's a whole new economy that comes out of

**Host** (29:13)

it. The old internet went away in 1997 from pay per use.

**Sam Ragsdale** (29:20)

Well, it never even got there. It never even got there. So they put the code in, but they couldn't do it. They had no payment for it. It was a prophecy.

**Host** (29:25)

It was, we're going to build the driveway because we might have a car one day.

**Sam Ragsdale** (29:29)

Yes, exactly.

**Host** (29:30)

And then obviously the technology caught up. It seems like you're alluding to, we might be going back towards this micropayment, pay for information, pay for the little transactions and movements. Is that sort of what you're seeing?

**Sam Ragsdale** (29:43)

Yeah, we'll see how it plays out. I would say that the big caveat here is that people have gotten used to this incentive model, you know, over 25 years. And it's a very good, you know, it's a $300 billion a year business for Google. And so we'll see how it plays out. The other thing that has happened over that time is that people have gotten very used to the concept that digital goods are free.

Because advertising is such a profitable business model, it's not cheap to run Facebook, you know, the servers that run Facebook, that run Instagram, etc. But because advertising is so profitable, they've All of this, of course, made the unit economics their work. And so I think it'll take some time. It probably won't at first be news articles or Wikipedia that will move to machine payments because those machines will probably just go to something else.

I think it'll probably be the more niche goods and services that agents need to get stuff done. enrichment data, take this person, let me find their contact details, maybe KYC data that banks use behind the scenes, maybe satellite data for hedge funds, drone data for hedge funds. So I think it'll start kind of more niche at the edge, and then more and more of the internet will be monetized that way.

**Host** (30:44)

You've been on the investor side, now you're on the founder side. When you think about the future of kind of market intelligence, even as a meta moment we're doing now, there's some kind of alpha about hearing from someone who's in the trenches, in the arena, building an agentic finance that say an investment firm might be interested in.

Do you see there as sort of like a future of market intelligence where agents scraping the transcripts of all the market podcasts of the world to get research, finding information in new niches?

**Sam Ragsdale** (31:11)

Yeah, I think that's very possible that you would be able to research much broader information sets and pay for different information sets. I can't tell you whether or not that would make you a better investor and give you a better portfolio, but it certainly might. I think there's another opportunity when you put an agent in the loop for like better polling, which is like if you want to pull a population of 50,000 people before that was like extremely expensive to do. You probably need a team.

You have to reach out to all those people. You have to make sure they're in a really good spot. But theoretically, with an agent, and particularly stablecoins, where sending money is as easy as sending a file, you could theoretically get an agent to spin up some sort of survey and poll a massive population of people and pay them for their time and input.

**Host** (31:50)

And stablecoins, it seems like, are a pretty attractive vehicle in the world of agenda commerce.

**Sam Ragsdale** (31:57)

Yeah, so a few things. One, subcent transaction fees. If you are transacting for a good or service that costs $0.05, obviously $0.30 fixed fees of credit cards does not work. So subcent transaction fees are great. No marginal fees whatsoever, so you can send any amount of money with no cost. International, by default, it's like moving a file. It's fully digital. It goes cross-border and no interchange is quite nice as well.

But I think the Most critical piece for agents is instant finality or roughly instant settlement. Why agent cash is called agent cash is because cash is the closest equivalent to a stablecoin that exists. When I have a dollar, I hand you a dollar and now you have the dollar and you're certain that you have the dollar. That doesn't exist with any of the other digital forms of payment that we have, whether that's ACH or wire or international wire, swift, credit card.

There's, you know, T plus two at best and then up to T plus 30, T plus 60. And so if you're transacting with an agent, you can do this sophisticated know your agent policy thing. You can do this sort of the browser fingerprinting that a checkout does to try to figure out if this is a fraudulent charge. You can do some sort of IP checking to try to estimate if this is like a real person or a scammer in Ukraine or a bot or a bot acting on behalf of somebody. Or you could just use stablecoins.

If I have a stablecoin and I hand it to you, now you have a stablecoin. We're good to go. And so if you're a merchant transacting with hundreds of thousands of agents and doing millions of dollars of volume a year, stablecoins are really compelling. You don't take any risk. The person hands you the stablecoin up front or the fraction of a stablecoin up front, and then you hand back your digital goods and services and the transaction is good to go.

**Host** (33:28)

In terms of adoption, we mentioned how fast adoption was in general of LLMs and how we're accelerating towards a more agentic world as those get more advanced and they become really embedded and integrated into lots of technologies that we're using. That said, even as you were giving kind of

**Drew Rogers** (33:47)

the

**Host** (33:47)

laundry list of all the ways you could have agents into your financial life, and this is both on an individual and institutional level, I can see the risk alarms going off in many people's heads or many institutions' heads being worried about kind of, I mean, to reference Buffett again, number one rule, he says, don't lose money. Right? So it's kind of like, oh, well, this seems like it could save us time and money, move us more quickly, be more efficient, maybe find a new opportunity, et cetera.

There's lots of good wins, but it also feels like maybe this could go more wrong. Of course there's human error, but with this kind of competing forces towards adoption, do you see this adoption curve? You think it's going to happen faster? You think it's like, oh, this is going to be like self-driving cars. It's going to happen slower than, like the technology is going to be there fast, but the user adoption is going to happen slowly.

**Sam Ragsdale** (34:38)

technology is there yeah adoption is not so the question is when that will happen and it's once there's a very very compelling user experience and i think for stable coins particularly the main blocker there is the ramps the ability to access stable coins probably most viewers know this but getting stable coins is very hard so as a consumer you have to go through kyc that limit has recently been up to progressive kyc Above about two thousand twenty five hundred dollars depending on your on ramp and so you can get stable coins in advance and then you kyc afterwards but there's still sort of this identity flow that happens for businesses in order to buy stable coins you have to go through kyb know your business that is significantly more arduous and most businesses would be unwilling to do that in order to use stable coins even if you got three percent cheaper fees thanks to no interchange and so that's an adoption hurdle The thing that I think is happening, though, behind the scenes is these neobanks are building it directly in.

And so new banks like Erbor, the Palmer Luckey, and a few others. Bank has stablecoins natively. I think Mercury is doing it natively as well, and many other people. My personal consumer bank does not have it, but you could imagine a world where every bank has stablecoins on day one. Drew Rogers, Sam Ragsdale, BVNK, Dani Vilardell, Stabledash Global, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live.

**Host** (36:04)

But you're such a builder. You're going to be building a long time. You've had one significant pivot at least. I'm sure there's maybe some micro pivots in there. But now, as you said, you're in the flow, like the flow of money. You've stepped into the river a little bit. And so there's maybe this is a tributary of agentic flows of money and it's a smaller stream right now. But as you said, it's going to grow. Being visionary for a second. Where are you going?

Maybe what's the vision you're going to raise on next round, next iteration?

**Sam Ragsdale** (36:35)

I mentioned this earlier with my motivations, but I think that this is key. I believe that every consumer, every business will have an agent or a fleet of agents that are entirely aligned with them that do a lot of their bidding on their behalf. This is sort of how we step into the next age as humanity is that you have these super intelligence agents that do all of this tedious work that you don't want to do in the background.

It's very important that these intelligences are user aligned rather than business aligned. And so I'll give you an example of this, which is Amazon Rufus is the LLM that is built into Amazon, recently renamed Amazon Alexa, and it helps users with shopping recommendations. The issue with Amazon providing that intelligence to you is that it's aligned with Amazon and it's aligned with their $80 billion a year advertising business. And so show me

**Host** (37:20)

the incentives.

**Sam Ragsdale** (37:21)

Exactly. You see a world where it's provided by Amazon as one where it tries to convince you the same type of LLM that we've gotten used to being incredibly empathetic, incredibly user aligned, well tuned by the people at Anthropic and OpenAI and others. All of those things go out the window when the incentive is switched from be the best agent for a user to be the best agent for an advertiser or a merchant.

And so I think we're at a really important juncture in the road where agentic commerce can be user-aligned or it can be advertiser-aligned. And I think that the world where it's user-aligned is a much more interesting world for us all. And so that's what we're pushing towards. We want to make sure that all of the commerce in the world, all of the checkouts are open to all agents.

We want to make sure particularly one of the ways that this plays out is that there's bilateral agreements between merchants and AI providers, agent providers. And so you can imagine ChatGPT having a specific integration with Amazon and Gemini having a specific integration with Shopify. And those two bilateral deals exist and you must do a BD agreement in order to get one.

And that's the only way that you can buy stuff going forward is to use the Gemini agent or use the ChatGPT agent or whatever the next one that comes along.

**Host** (38:34)

Or

**Sam Ragsdale** (38:34)

there's a world of open agenda commerce where every checkout is available to every agent. Whether you want to use the ChatGPT or the Gemini agent, great. Or you want to use the one that you built in your free time with your open source. I think that that world is a world where the agents could possibly be user aligned and is much more interesting.

**Host** (38:49)

I like it. A user-aligned world of agentic commerce. That's where we're going. Final thoughts. Anything we didn't hit that we should have hit?

**Sam Ragsdale** (38:56)

No, I think agentic commerce is coming. If anybody out there is building goods or services that they want to sell to agents, please reach out. We'd love to help you. We spent a lot of time with merchants making their endpoints compatible.

**Host** (39:07)

I love it. I think big things are coming for Merit Systems.

**Sam Ragsdale** (39:10)

I hope so.

**Host** (39:11)

Yeah. I still like the name, by the way. I know it was originally...

**Sam Ragsdale** (39:13)

It's still vaguely relevant. It still feels vaguely relevant. Yeah, it still does. It's now sort of the umbrella brand. We think about it as any sphere is to Cursor. I think it still fits in a little bit. So we're keeping the merch around. We're keeping the name and the emails.

**Host** (39:25)

Well, it's funny, sidetrack, but thinking about contracts, you ever sign a B2B contract? It feels like there's almost always some kind of parent company that's like,

**Drew Rogers** (39:35)

hmm, that.

**Host** (39:36)

And then there's DBA,

**Drew Rogers** (39:37)

whatever the brand. Yeah, there's a pivot. There's always, even the big legit ones, there's usually a pivot. So

**Host** (39:42)

honestly, super interesting. You're on the frontier of this and I think are already playing in a way that's very exciting and relevant. It's fun to imagine what's gonna happen in year three, four, five, and so on. I feel like this could be one we look back on and be like,

**Sam Ragsdale** (39:54)

huh, So that was the beginning. Very early innings. We're in the flat part of the chart. Very early.

**Host** (39:59)

Well, we're excited to hear more as the months and years come. So thank you so much for coming on.

**Sam Ragsdale** (40:03)

Absolutely.