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Assistant Professor, IIT Indore
Ethereum Day · IIT Indore · 10 October 2026
Inbox triaged
Agent calls a shop
Groceries bought
Trip planned
Agent pays an agent
Agents keep trading
The first four are life. The last two are money.
They need a different payment system.
From answering questions to running errands.
You ask. It answers.
You set a goal. It plans, uses tools, acts, checks, repeats.
Browsers, phones, calendars … and now a wallet.
Agent emails dealers, plays quotes against each other — buys a car.
Agent with a phone number calls 5 restaurants at once, books a table.
Folder of receipts → agent files overdue VAT returns on the tax portal.
Agent spots a rejected insurance claim, sends a rebuttal unasked. Claim reopened.
Agent figures out how to control an air purifier, then runs it for health goals.
"flightclaw": watches a route, pings you when fares drop.
Self-reported claims by the posters. | Background: "Clawd bought a car" (blog)
Plan meals, fill the cart, pay inside the chat.
"Let Google call" stores; auto-buy when price hits target.
NPCI + Razorpay trial: you pre-approve how much the agent can spend (UPI Reserve Pay).
Agent "Muse" coming to AI glasses; sales up 263% in a year.
Sources: TechCrunch: Instacart | TechCrunch: Google | Onmanorama: UPI pilot | 9to5Google | iTechPost
"Take a picture of your credit card, drop it in the chat and Grok … will scour the Internet for the best deal … and order it."
"I just asked Grok … to research the most fun Lego Star Wars kits for young kids and order them."
Hands-free orders while driving (AirPods, coffee); live coffee and concert-ticket purchases in Europe with ING and Mastercard.
A photo of your card in a chat shares the card. A spending limit is safer.
Views as of Oct 11, 2026. | Matt Britton: AI shopping agents
"Confirm before acting." Agent deletes the inbox anyway: it forgot the instruction when its memory filled up.
Assistant checks Resy ~200 times an hour for a table. Account banned.
Agent makes its own accounts, buys a website name with a limited card, applies to 278 jobs.
Capability is here. Permission is the unsolved part.
Sources: TechCrunch: inbox | CNN: Resy | Inc.
more US shoppers arriving from AI chats, holiday 2025 (Adobe)
Cyber Week sales influenced by AI & agents (Salesforce)
Consumers willing to let AI make the purchase (Gartner, May 2026)
Agents now do almost everything — up to the payment step.
Sources: Adobe | Salesforce | Gartner
When software stops shopping for you
and starts trading with other software.
Agents are cheap to copy, never sleep, and pay in tiny amounts.
Today's payment systems were built for the first two.
At home this is solved. Across borders it is not.
Sources: Outlook Business: UPI Aug 2026 | World Bank: Remittance Prices Worldwide
Free for you does not mean free for the merchant.
Sources: Forbes India: UPI charges · card MDR is a typical figure
Per ₹100 of sales, with an MDR of 0.4% (an example rate).
UPI has zero MDR for merchants since Jan 2020; the government pays part of the cost.
A new law lets the government allow UPI charges. Talk of ~0.3% for large merchants; no final decision.
MDR is charged on the sale, not on the profit. Thin profit margins feel it first.
Sources: Forbes India: UPI charges bill | News on AIR: Finance Ministry, Jun 2025 | Deccan Herald: ₹1,500 crore incentive
Same merchant, same fee. The new question is permission.
Sources: TechCrunch: Instacart | UPI Reserve Pay pilot | Forbes
No card or bank account fits here. This is where blockchains fit best.
Sources: x402.org | Olas: ~14.8M agent-to-agent payments (self-reported)
The agent economy can be a new way for people to earn.
Sources: YC: Humwork | @Cointelegraph on RentAHuman
"Companies are in some sense
the original superintelligence."
— Patrick Collison, Stripe · x.com/patrickc · Oct 2026
Personal agents give the buyer one too.
Old tactics weaken. Who gains overall is unclear.
Paraphrasing Collison's thread. | @patrickc | TokenPost summary
Rational agents converge on one best product.
Agents learn your taste; people stop all buying the same thing.
Agents read specs, not ads, so better products win.
Question posed in @patrickc's thread · discussed at agifriday #134
The power shift depends on who controls the agent — and its money.
A bank's ID check expects a person, not software.
Banks close on weekends and holidays. Agents don't.
A fixed fee makes paying ₹0.01 impossible.
Checkout pages, CAPTCHAs, OTPs — built for human eyes.
Every fee is bigger than the payment. The fix is a bundled payment: add up many tiny payments, pay once.
Rough figures at ≈ ₹88 per US dollar; blockchain fees change with how busy the network is. | stripe.com/pricing | l2fees.info
Internet-native workers
need internet-native money.
Why blockchains suit software that pays.
| Agent needs | What a blockchain gives |
|---|---|
| Account, no paperwork | A crypto wallet is ready in seconds. |
| Money software can send | Stablecoins: always worth $1, and software can pay with them. |
| Tiny, instant payments | L2 networks: seconds, under a cent. |
| Spending limits | Smart wallets: spending limits, approved merchants, keys that expire. |
| Trust strangers | Locked payments + ERC-8004 ID cards and ratings. |
| Open 24/7, global | No business days. No borders. |
HTTP/1.1 reserves 402 "for future use."
Coinbase's open protocol finally uses it: pay inside the web request itself.
No account. No sign-up. No checkout page. One step.
Sources: RFC 2068 §10.4.3 | x402.org | github.com/coinbase/x402
"Agents can actually pay each other now, with x402 … inside Google's new AP2."
Congratulates Coinbase for extending x402 to AP2.
"Agent payments will soon overtake human payments on the internet."
Agentic Wallets: agents can "spend, earn, and trade autonomously."
Also: @stripe on ACP | @patrickc "Tempo is live!" | @sytaylor "the HTTP for Money"
"Autonomous agents need infrastructure to make secure payments."
Launches Agent Pay for Machines, for fast machine-to-machine payments; 30+ partners.
"AI agents are moving from making recommendations to completing transactions."
Their focus: proving you agreed before the AI agent pays.
Views as of Oct 11, 2026. Mastercard also announced work with Ant International on checking AI agents (Sep 2026).
x402 payments in a year, per Coinbase
total stablecoins actually paid (Jul 2026)
of one audit's dollars came from a single program (Bitquery)
"x402 txs up 10,000%" — @Cointelegraph
"Still mostly a mirage": 731K/day → 57K/day — @artemis
Sources: The Defiant | agenteconomy.to | Bitquery audit | Chainalysis (notes memecoin farming) | TRM Labs: who is actually paying
agents · Feb 2026
registered · Oct 2026
Most on BNB Chain (~366K); Ethereum ~70K. Lots of sign-ups, few working agents.
Sources: EIP-8004 | Bitcoin.com (Feb count) | 8004scan (Oct 11) | Agent Economy (by chain) | arXiv 2606.12128
Smart wallets (ERC-4337, EIP-7702) refuse anything over the limit.
Said to set a spending limit for his agent of $100/day.
Illustrative pseudo-config. | ERC-4337 | EIP-7702 | StartupFortune on Buterin's post
Stablecoins — USDC, USDT · ~$300B supply
Ethereum + L2 networks (Base …), Solana, Tempo, Arc
Smart wallets with spending limits
ERC-8004 ID card · ratings · work check
x402 · MPP · AP2 · ACP
OpenClaw, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini … your bot
AP2 carries x402. Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google back the x402 Foundation (Linux Foundation, Apr 2026).
OpenAI scaled back in-chat checkout (Mar 2026) because few people used it.
Sources: Unchained: x402 Foundation | Forbes: Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase | American Banker | Arc mainnet
stablecoin supply, Sep 2026 (peak ~$322B in May)
of agent stablecoin payments use USDC (Coinbase)
GENIUS Act: first US stablecoin law: every coin backed by a real dollar
Dollars that move like messages.
Sources: stablecoinbeat tracker | Forbes | The Defiant | @RepFrenchHill (signing)
Agents that hold wallets, earn, spend — and hire.
Andreessen grants Truth Terminal $50K in BTC.
GOAT joke coin reaches $428M. Freysa game: human tricks AI out of 13 ETH.
x402, AP2, ACP. GENIUS Act signed.
ERC-8004 mainnet · Agentic Wallets · Tempo + MPP.
Circle's Arc launches. Vitalik: agents as Ethereum's main interface in ~2 years.
Sources: @pmarca | @AISafetyMemes | The Block: Freysa | @WuBlockchain (Vitalik, Oct 6 2026)
"Just did a full end-to-end test: updated my ENS record using a local python script reading and sending through my local node."
"Even with a local AI agent, you can learn a lot about what someone is doing if you see all of their search engine calls."
AI agents could become the main way people use Ethereum within about two years.
Run the AI agent on your own computer, protect privacy, keep a spending limit.
Quotes from @VitalikButerin on X, via Grok search. | @WuBlockchain (Oct 6 talk)
"My OpenClaw … made its first dollars online selling to other bots."
x.com/plbiojout ↗18K+ agents, $479M "agentic GDP" on Base.
10M+ agent-to-agent transactions (~14.8M by Oct).
RentAHuman: agents hire humans for physical tasks, pay in crypto.
Polymarket bot: $1.2K → $270K in 11 days.
Treat as claims: self-reported metrics may include farming and test traffic. | olas.network
The AI agent asks for help through a plug-in. A checked human expert joins and answers.
$1 per minute (≈ ₹88), paid in 10-minute blocks.
Started 2026; "3,000+ experts, 83% solved" is self-reported.
The agent economy hires people too.
Sources: YC: Humwork | TestingCatalog | humwork.ai
Agent makes TikTok slideshows, checks which ones bring sales, improves → paying app subscribers.
Lets agents work safely inside business software (Salesforce, SAP).
Agent runs a shop. Phase 1 lost money; phase 2 turned a profit.
Small, focused jobs earn. Social media rewards the demo, not the measured result.
Ranking by economic utility, compiled with Grok; claims as posted. | Larry guide | Finance Magnates: Public | The Decoder: Vend phase 2
"Agent payments will soon overtake human payments."
— @tempo, Mar 2026
"Still mostly a mirage."
— @artemis, Feb 2026
Both can be true. Watch the volume, not the count.
Give software a wallet, and words become withdrawals.
A trick message in Morse code to Grok → bot sends 3B DRB (~$150–200K).
Told it to "make no mistakes." Meant to tip ~4 SOL; sent 52M of its coins (~$250K+) after a restart wiped its memory.
Attempt #482 redefines "approveTransfer" → 13.19 ETH released.
Hackers get into its control panel → 55.5 ETH drained.
Spending limits · approved merchants · ask a human for big amounts · locked payments · ratings.
Buterin's post is said to count ~15% of OpenClaw plug-ins as harmful.
A small persuasive minority tips well-aligned agents, one interaction at a time.
Ignoring roles, forgetting, not double-checking: teams of agents often do worse than one.
Talking together can create a wrong group belief no single agent has.
In bigger groups a wrong belief can suddenly spread or flip.
Project Vend's "CEO" agent didn't catch the shopkeeper's mistakes.
Sources: @_philschmid on multi-agent failures | @a_baronca on group-size effects | Gigazine: Vend phase 2 | research: "Conformity Generates Collective Misalignment in AI Agents Societies"
Agent pays the wrong party. Who owes whom?
Check the work before a locked payment is released.
Measure the agent economy without fake activity.
Public blockchains show every agent purchase.
Rules an AI can't be talked out of.
ID checks for agents? Stablecoin rules (GENIUS Act, RBI) for machines?
Agents are learning to live with us.
Now they're learning to pay.
Thank you.
Debasish Pattanayak · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Indore · drdebmath.github.io