The Race to Build Agentic Commerce

How AI agents, stablecoins, and micropayments could rebuild the internet’s business model.

David Hoffman
Mar 21, 2026 • 4 min read

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Agentic commerce. Agentic commerce. Agentic commerce.

If you are interested in AI, crypto, and the economic topology of the internet, then this 2025 Ben Thompson article The Agentic Web and Original Sin should be required reading.

The thesis of this article is highly topical to some pretty big Bankless podcast episodes we’ve done in the past:

Reinventing the Internet with Marc Andreessen

This is where Marc gives the idea of the “Original Sin of the Internet”, which was to not include a native payments system at genesis. As a result of that, the ad-model of the internet took hold. Users became the product, content was free, and websites simply were a clearinghouse between users’ eyeballs and advertisers' products.

How Crypto Fixes the Internet with Antonio García Martínez

Antonio argues something counter to Marc’s thesis – ads are good actually, and the ads actually fueled the growth of the internet by harmonizing the interests of the three relevant parties: Users, websites, and advertisers.

Ben Thompson agrees with Antonio, and says Marc is too hard on himself. There was no intuitive way to integrate money into the internet before stablecoins.

But now, in 2026, we have capable AI agents, stablecoins, and blockchains with enough bandwidth for micro-transactions. Combined, these three technologies have the potential to reconstruct the internet as we know it today.

How? First, if you’re keeping up with the frontier of AI technology, you should notice that your time spent on ChatGPT or Claude is replacing the time you spend “browsing the web.” AI is becoming the default interface for users on the internet. In addition to that, I also think that the visual form factor of ChatGPT and Claude basically looking like the now-archaic Google search bar will be viewed as skeuomorphic in the future.

Our podcast with Illia Polosukhin will come out this week, where he’ll tell you...

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