April 22, 2026
The third wave: Why the agent economy needs a new financial stack
Technology change tends to move in three waves.
The first wave is efficiency: doing what we already do, faster and cheaper. The second wave is consumption increase: as costs fall, we find that we want more, and new businesses emerge to serve that demand. The third wave is novel economic activity; it’s the most powerful and the hardest to predict. Things that would have been completely unimaginable before the technology existed.
Look at what happened with the advent of mobile phones: The first wave was efficiency: you no longer needed to wander the streets looking for a pay phone. The second wave was consumption: Uber, DoorDash, Grubhub and then “Tuesday night takeout” everywhere, not just pizza and Chinese food. But mobile unleashed novel forms of economic activity. Just as cars created the suburb, the motel, and the shopping mall, mobile created the influencer economy. The idea that a person could build a livelihood by being followed online would have sounded like science fiction to someone in the mid-nineties. Mobile made it real.
AI will undoubtedly follow a similar path, but the honest truth is that the behaviors defining the second and third waves are still barely visible, even as the efficiency transformation with agentic systems is already supercharging our best companies.
We can see the glimmers. Last holiday season, there was a 700 percent increase in AI-assisted shopping. OpenAI is now answering 84 million shopping questions per week. Playwright — an open-source browser automation tool and a useful proxy for agentic activity — has more than doubled its weekly downloads over the past 18 months. People are building the agentic economy right now. The statistics just haven't caught up yet.
It’s clear that agents will be a novel form of economic activity. Agents will be actors in the financial system. Not just tools that help humans make decisions, but autonomous entities that plan, act and transact on behalf of users and organizations. And that raises a question that looks simple but isn't: what does the financial stack for an agent actually look like?
Why agents are different
Financial services have always been built around humans. The account holder is a person. The card swipe requires a hand. KYC means "know your customer," and customers means people (or at least groups of people organized into businesses).
AI agents break that assumption. An agent running a procurement workflow, managing a company's vendor payments or autonomously spinning up cloud infrastructure needs to be able to spend money. But the agent doesn't have an SSN. It can't walk into a branch. Its device ID and physical location are in the cloud and infinitely mutable.
The legacy financial system, with its batch ACH windows, manual underwriting and human-in-the-loop compliance wasn't built for this. But stablecoins are. And if agents are doing anything at scale, they needs programmable, auditable, instant money rails.
Stablecoins as the native currency of the agent economy
What makes stablecoins uniquely suited to agentic payments?
They're programmable. A stablecoin payment can be triggered by a smart contract, an API call, or an autonomous process with no human required. You don't need to schedule an ACH wire. You send USDC the way you call a function.
They settle instantly. Agents don't wait for end-of-day batch processing. If an agent is spinning up infrastructure at 2 a.m., it needs to pay at 2 a.m. Stablecoins don't sleep.
They're auditable by design. On-chain transaction history is the native audit trail. For finance and compliance teams trying to understand what their agents spent money on, this is enormously valuable.
They cross borders without friction. A global agent economy needs global money. USDC doesn't know what country it's in.
That said, stablecoins alone don't solve the full picture. Agents also need to interface with traditional financial infrastructure. The real world still runs on bank accounts with fiat money, virtual cards to spend with Stripe or AWS, and real business identities that satisfy KYB requirements.
The first step: Giving agents a bank account
Opening a business bank account requires identity verification, beneficial ownership disclosure and compliance review. Each piece of this process built around the assumption that a human is in the loop. The fintech ecosystem has made this dramatically easier over the last decade, but "easier for humans" isn't the same as "compatible with autonomous agents."
Now, for the first time, real solutions are emerging. Meow, a business banking and treasury platform built for the companies most likely to run agentic workflows — crypto-native companies, VC-backed startups, and global businesses like Cayman, BVI, Bermuda, Panama, and others — has become the only fintech in the world to allow AI agents to open actual business checking accounts and issue virtual cards. Pair that with Meow's stablecoin rails, USDC/USDT payment support and virtual card issuance, and you start to see the outline of what a full agentic financial stack looks like.
Meow is rising out of a broader wave of companies and open standards specifically designed to enable agentic financial action in the real world. Consortium efforts like x402 and the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) are attempting to establish shared infrastructure for agent-to-agent and agent-to-merchant transactions. Companies like Sapiom.ai, Nevermined, Lava Payments, and Natural.co are each building pieces of this stack, all with the idea that autonomous systems will be primary actors in an emerging agentic economy. For a deeper look at how this landscape is taking shape, see our piece on the history of agentic payments. What's becoming clear is that even as incumbents are focused on this space, the problem is unsolved and startups are increasingly the center of the picture for how financial services empowers agents.
The bigger picture
In some sense this agentic economy IS the metaverse. When Zuckerberg bet big on the metaverse, he was right about the concept but wrong about who would participate. The metaverse will not be you and me strapped into headsets like the Matrix. The metaverse will be agents acting on our behalf in digital space.
This emerging financial stack is why we’re so excited to be investors in Meow and also companies like Catena Labs, where Sean Neville is bringing his experience at Circle to create an AI-native financial institution. It’s why we’re so bullish on stablecoins.
Human and agent experiences are fundamentally different. Humans need low friction, simple calls to action, emotional resonance. Agents don't care about friction. More information is better. They can optimize and negotiate to the nth degree. That's a completely different design surface.
Every point of friction between here and there is a fintech opportunity. Markets, reputation systems, security, payments infrastructure, fraud detection, observability — these are the tools that need to come together to unlock the agentic economy. Meow's work on agent bank accounts is one of the earliest and most concrete examples of that build beginning in earnest.
We're in the third wave now. And if history is any guide, this is where the most important companies get built.
Technology change tends to move in three waves.
The first wave is efficiency: doing what we already do, faster and cheaper. The second wave is consumption increase: as costs fall, we find that we want more, and new businesses emerge to serve that demand. The third wave is novel economic activity; it’s the most powerful and the hardest to predict. Things that would have been completely unimaginable before the technology existed.
Look at what happened with the advent of mobile phones: The first wave was efficiency: you no longer needed to wander the streets looking for a pay phone. The second wave was consumption: Uber, DoorDash, Grubhub and then “Tuesday night takeout” everywhere, not just pizza and Chinese food. But mobile unleashed novel forms of economic activity. Just as cars created the suburb, the motel, and the shopping mall, mobile created the influencer economy. The idea that a person could build a livelihood by being followed online would have sounded like science fiction to someone in the mid-nineties. Mobile made it real.
AI will undoubtedly follow a similar path, but the honest truth is that the behaviors defining the second and third waves are still barely visible, even as the efficiency transformation with agentic systems is already supercharging our best companies.
We can see the glimmers. Last holiday season, there was a 700 percent increase in AI-assisted shopping. OpenAI is now answering 84 million shopping questions per week. Playwright — an open-source browser automation tool and a useful proxy for agentic activity — has more than doubled its weekly downloads over the past 18 months. People are building the agentic economy right now. The statistics just haven't caught up yet.
It’s clear that agents will be a novel form of economic activity. Agents will be actors in the financial system. Not just tools that help humans make decisions, but autonomous entities that plan, act and transact on behalf of users and organizations. And that raises a question that looks simple but isn't: what does the financial stack for an agent actually look like?
Why agents are different
Financial services have always been built around humans. The account holder is a person. The card swipe requires a hand. KYC means "know your customer," and customers means people (or at least groups of people organized into businesses).
AI agents break that assumption. An agent running a procurement workflow, managing a company's vendor payments or autonomously spinning up cloud infrastructure needs to be able to spend money. But the agent doesn't have an SSN. It can't walk into a branch. Its device ID and physical location are in the cloud and infinitely mutable.
The legacy financial system, with its batch ACH windows, manual underwriting and human-in-the-loop compliance wasn't built for this. But stablecoins are. And if agents are doing anything at scale, they needs programmable, auditable, instant money rails.
Stablecoins as the native currency of the agent economy
What makes stablecoins uniquely suited to agentic payments?
They're programmable. A stablecoin payment can be triggered by a smart contract, an API call, or an autonomous process with no human required. You don't need to schedule an ACH wire. You send USDC the way you call a function.
They settle instantly. Agents don't wait for end-of-day batch processing. If an agent is spinning up infrastructure at 2 a.m., it needs to pay at 2 a.m. Stablecoins don't sleep.
They're auditable by design. On-chain transaction history is the native audit trail. For finance and compliance teams trying to understand what their agents spent money on, this is enormously valuable.
They cross borders without friction. A global agent economy needs global money. USDC doesn't know what country it's in.
That said, stablecoins alone don't solve the full picture. Agents also need to interface with traditional financial infrastructure. The real world still runs on bank accounts with fiat money, virtual cards to spend with Stripe or AWS, and real business identities that satisfy KYB requirements.
The first step: Giving agents a bank account
Opening a business bank account requires identity verification, beneficial ownership disclosure and compliance review. Each piece of this process built around the assumption that a human is in the loop. The fintech ecosystem has made this dramatically easier over the last decade, but "easier for humans" isn't the same as "compatible with autonomous agents."
Now, for the first time, real solutions are emerging. Meow, a business banking and treasury platform built for the companies most likely to run agentic workflows — crypto-native companies, VC-backed startups, and global businesses like Cayman, BVI, Bermuda, Panama, and others — has become the only fintech in the world to allow AI agents to open actual business checking accounts and issue virtual cards. Pair that with Meow's stablecoin rails, USDC/USDT payment support and virtual card issuance, and you start to see the outline of what a full agentic financial stack looks like.
Meow is rising out of a broader wave of companies and open standards specifically designed to enable agentic financial action in the real world. Consortium efforts like x402 and the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) are attempting to establish shared infrastructure for agent-to-agent and agent-to-merchant transactions. Companies like Sapiom.ai, Nevermined, Lava Payments, and Natural.co are each building pieces of this stack, all with the idea that autonomous systems will be primary actors in an emerging agentic economy. For a deeper look at how this landscape is taking shape, see our piece on the history of agentic payments. What's becoming clear is that even as incumbents are focused on this space, the problem is unsolved and startups are increasingly the center of the picture for how financial services empowers agents.
The bigger picture
In some sense this agentic economy IS the metaverse. When Zuckerberg bet big on the metaverse, he was right about the concept but wrong about who would participate. The metaverse will not be you and me strapped into headsets like the Matrix. The metaverse will be agents acting on our behalf in digital space.
This emerging financial stack is why we’re so excited to be investors in Meow and also companies like Catena Labs, where Sean Neville is bringing his experience at Circle to create an AI-native financial institution. It’s why we’re so bullish on stablecoins.
Human and agent experiences are fundamentally different. Humans need low friction, simple calls to action, emotional resonance. Agents don't care about friction. More information is better. They can optimize and negotiate to the nth degree. That's a completely different design surface.
Every point of friction between here and there is a fintech opportunity. Markets, reputation systems, security, payments infrastructure, fraud detection, observability — these are the tools that need to come together to unlock the agentic economy. Meow's work on agent bank accounts is one of the earliest and most concrete examples of that build beginning in earnest.
We're in the third wave now. And if history is any guide, this is where the most important companies get built.