Great takes here on what widespread agent adoption could mean for the economy. Some more thoughts: • On the economic impact of agents, I think we can already make some reasonable predictions: as strategies to extract higher prices prove less successful, offers will attract more demand and targeted deals will be key to reaching specific customers. With buyers better able to compare and switch, loyalty will matter more. Gaps in buyer and seller fees across marketplaces will narrow, with fees increasingly reflecting the value of the services they provide beyond discovery. All of this will naturally produce new pricing models and commercial mechanics, making programmability a key property of commerce. Perhaps most importantly, closed ecosystems will lose to open ones in the long run. • I totally agree that better products will increasingly win because agents excel at discovering them. From local restaurants to infrastructure providers to professional services, I personally keep noticing signs of discovery rewarding quality over marketing budgets. This also means the ability to vibe-build products will help unique new products emerge, while perhaps having less impact than we initially expected on incumbents with great products, provided they are quick enough to adapt. Overall, I think this will dramatically improve both average product quality and the range of products serving specific niches—which is awesome for both startups and users. • “A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects […] or increase dispersion.”
Big question indeed. I think it’s too early to call this one, but I’m strongly betting that positions within those distributions will change dramatically, with leaders more vulnerable to being quickly replaced, mainly because of accelerating product development and the shifting balance between distribution and product quality. In other words: every sector will be disrupted, and the leaders will be the ones most flexible and prepared to take advantage of the new economy. • I’m also quite convinced personal agents will be on the consumer’s side. That makes Amazon’s apparent strategy of favoring agents it controls look like an attempt to protect its existing economics against the shift toward open, interoperable systems. Very curious to see whether market dominance can sustain that strategy as customers get used to agents working for them. > “The market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine.” Beautiful. Probably the best definition I’ve ever read of the global market. And it goes straight to the core of what Slice is and the value it brings to the world. What happens when that that highly imperfect machine becomes fully programmable? When efficiency improves, hard-to-discover value becomes open and publicly accessible, and all the participants in the market can freely interact with it? That’s the whole point of the Slice commerce protocol, and I can’t wait to find out.

Amazon banning agents is the first opportunity I've seen since Amazon was founded for a startup to create an Amazon competitor. People will want agents to buy stuff for them. It will be one of the main use cases. And they won't want to use some Amazon-supplied agent to do it.

> A world computer should also be the main owner of its state. [...] Composability is the superpower of blockchains Exactly. Verifiable offchain computation is what lets Ethereum scale. Onchain state is what makes it composable. Ethereum's endgame is to hold the world's state. Slice applies this thesis to commerce, and doing it properly meant rebuilding commerce from scratch. I'll be going deep on this soon, but in a nutshell, when state moves onchain: - New primitives become possible, enabling more powerful, automated processes — on Slice we call this "smart commerce". - Many problems typical of web2 disappear. - New problems appear. DeFi showed what happens when one domain's state moves onchain. We're doing the same for commerce, and I expect the pattern to repeat across most domains over time. I believe one of Ethereum's main challenges is resolving the tension between privacy and composability. Ethereum wins when developers and users can decide what is private, shared or public, and everything stays composable. That's why I'm so excited about obfuscation. Most of the building blocks are in place, and the design space in commerce is immense. Truly grateful to everyone who has contributed and keeps contributing to Ethereum for making possible a future worth building toward.

‼️ BREAKING: Revolut handed over customers’ passport copies, verification selfies and full transaction histories to a malicious actor. The actor sent lawful government information-demand emails using a genuine government domain that passed domain authentication. Revolut later concluded they were not authentic. Affected customers were notified on Friday. What may have been disclosed ranges from name, date of birth and home address to account statements, withdrawal records and complete Bitcoin transaction history. The company says it has alerted the agency to the unauthorised mailbox on its domain, blocked the address and begun notifying regulators. It has not named the agency, explained how someone obtained a mailbox there, or given a number of affected customers. ZachXBT, who circulated the notices, believes the incident was limited in size and aimed at high-net-worth users.

x402 is good step forward, but if you’re interested in what next-gen commerce and auth look like, keep an eye on @slice__so

kind of surreal to think that we’re building a comparable stack on ethereum with a team of two, and are already ahead of stripe in many areas