The Agentic Future: Agentic Commerce (11.4.25)
Coinbase Q3 Earnings mention the rise of "Agentic Commerce" as its x402 protocol grabs attention. Season 1 of the AI Alpha Arena concludes with Alibaba's Qwen taking top spot.
I’ll use a decade of traditional finance/corporate experience to refine the chaos into bite-sized chunks for you to digest
This newsletter consists of three parts:
Snippet Partner (Momentum — MMT Finance)
Market Overview
Emerging Developments
Enjoy the journey and if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me on X
Momentum (MMT) dominates Sui as the #1 DEX with 62% market share, $534M+ TVL, and $15B+ in cumulative volume; the network’s core liquidity engine for stablecoin and BTCFi trading.
Backed by $10M from OKX Ventures and Coinbase Ventures, it delivers up to 152% APRs on BTCFi pools (LBTC, xBTC, wBTC) via concentrated liquidity and Wormhole cross-chain integration.
Its ve(3,3) model locks tokens for voting power directing 100% of protocol fees to participants, aligning liquidity providers long-term.
Its MMT token went live today with several tier 1 exchanges like Binance listing.
(Data Source: Defi Llama)
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AI Roundup
Decentralized AI (“DeAI”) ‘Crypto Twitter’ mindshare has remained flat at 27%:
a) The Rise of Agentic Commerce
While x402 has sipped slightly from last week, Coinbase mentioned agentic commerce in its recent quarterly earnings report:
I had the pleasure of attending the Coinbase post earnings Round Table where they explained how it intends to capitalize on the value accrual from trillions of agents making micropayments:
x402 is an open protocol so anyone can use it. But once this obtains critical mass having a fee switch could become extremely lucrative when you’ve developed the picks and shovels.
Institutional adoption and the relationship with Circle for USDC stablecoin transactions will also have some value accrual.
Other payment giants; Tether, Mastercard, VISA are all positioning in a similar manner with agentic stablecoin infra. Tether mentioned recently its new Wallet Development Kit is being built for trillions of users; most of those won’t be human!
b) DeAI Market Cap
The overall DeAI market cap is down by $3bn (-11%) to $24.8bn:
The standout performers this week continue to be TAO, as well as Virtuals:
ICP looks like it’s about to go on a parabolic run as DFINITY reveals “self writing apps” to power the ecosystem on top of ICP:
Virtuals and TAO saw a pump mid week following the x402 Agentic Commerce hype and TAO flow emissions revamp, respectively.
Near, Story and Render are all moving consistent with the broader crypto market downturn, which several say is leverage driven given the strong fundamentals.
c) Robotics Market Cap
The Robotics segment is down $90m (-28%%) to $320m:
Most of the robotics projects followed the broader crypto market price action, with most down double digits.
What’s wild is the overall Decentralized robotics MC is less than the amount of USDB minted; seems an undervalued segment given the potential disruption?
2. Crypto AI Agent Analysis
a) Nansen Smart Capital Flow Analysis
Smart capital net inflows continue on a selection of AI coins this week that are focused on agentic commerce, specifically x402:
VIRTUAL: Experiencing a boom from Agentic Commerce narrative as Tom Lee’s Fundstrat, Andrew Kang and Ansem mention the protocol.
FLOCK: Partnered with Ali Baba’s QWEN model; one that has outperformed on the trader agent competition “Alpha Arena” by NOF1
PAYAI: Huge inflows following the x402 hype, but price has retraced since.
b) Cookie Mindshare Analysis
ELSA: Is AI powered portfolio mgmt. and DeFi explorer, with multi language rollout backed by M31 Capital with $3m raise. Pre-TGE project with campaign currently underway
Cookie: Announced their revised cSNAPs model to Capital Mindshare to provide a more simplistic and easy to understand framework
Virtual: As above; Agentic Commerce with its society of agents
BNKR: One of the earlier projects to use x402 and heavy Base / Farcaster integration coming into the potential Base airdrop
CLANKER: Recently acquired by Farcaster and a Base favourite
KITE AI: Hype around its upcoming token launch with around a $1bn launch valuation, now trading at $700m
WARP (Warden Protocol): Global Agent Network where AI agents can earn, collaborate, and operate. They’ve just hit $1.7m of annualized revenue driven from agent transactions which is only going to ramp up as more agents plug into x402
REKT: Liquid Brand Equity concept continues to gain traction as Rekt pushes deeper into the energy drinks industry with its drops selling out in seconds. Its “Rekt Strategy” went live this week; accumulation of Rekt assets using its new DAT style structure
FARTCOIN: The “stink index” returning to the forefront of attention as AI coins gain traction, with the impending robotics boom. Purely memetic, no fundamentals.
AVA: Holoworld raised $183m for the Fight ICO pool, which was 122x oversubscribed.
3. AI Agents Developments: Innovations and Market Developments
i) Alpha Arena Season 1 Finale
Alibaba’s Qwen won the first season of Alpha Arena.
For those wondering what this is, it’s a competition of trader agents that are each given $10k to trade but each agent is powered by a different LLM.
Observation: Most LLMs lost money with the exception of Qwen and Deepseek; both open sourced models. Perhaps closed models are biased (to their own detriment) after all?
ii) Weekly DeAI Roundup
Here are some other interesting Crypto AI related developments this week — Link
News this week includes:
GoKiteAI Token checker goes live; rewards to early supporters. Binance launchpool + whitepaper published; the vision is to build the payment, ID & trust infra that currently prevents AI agents from transacting autonomously + safely
Bittensor is launching its biggest change since dTAO this week; $TAO is introducing “Net TAO Flow” for emissions; essentially if you’re net inflow of TAO then you’ll attract more emissions. Halving in <40 days
x402 protocol surpasses 3m transactions (txs)+ $3m volume; Coinbase
processes 88% of the txs. Keep an eye on decentralized facilitators in Q1. I’ve been banging on about where the value will accrue for these agentic payments; it’ll likely be the infra facilitating the txs, or products agents want to buy (data/compute/subs)
qBitTensorLabs SN48 “Quantum Compute” subnet went live on Bittensor; token is up 50% since launch on Friday. We need to pay attention to Quantum; protocols like NaorisProtocol are pushing quantum security in web3. elonmusk
even stated:
“Quantum computing is best done in the permanently shadowed craters on the Moon”
Tom Lee joins ethermage to discuss virtuals_io and how AI coordination and payments are taking root on Ethereum
Ch40sChain is getting traction, being described as the missing link to driving accountability for agents through its “proof of agency”. Think of it as the verifiability of agents so as not to interact with malicious agents. x402 enables agentic micropayments, ERC-8004 provides the registry of agents for discoverability and this offers a security layer
HIVEDigitalTech buys 32.5 acres in New Brunswick for Tier III+ AI/HPC campuses; targets 25 000+ GPUs
flowith_ai is dubbed the “OpenAI Atlas rival” an operating system built for agents; agentic browsing systems gaining traction
gaib_ai launches its “AI Dollar” ($AID); Agentic stables used for compute, API calls, data access in the era of AI and robotics
cryptocom has announced the introduction of its Model Context Protocol (MCP); this enables agents to interact with real world data
GeminiApp leads on the openservai prediction market AI Arena - you can monitor here: https://arena.openserv.ai/polymarket -
cookiedotfun reveals that its token is now 98% vested for investors, suggesting possible reductions in sell pressure moving forward. This all comes as its cSNAPs campaigns gain traction
The largest cSNAP rewards for vooi_io (30% now split for korean snappers); a perp DEX aggregator that’s backed by YZiLabs - probably worth paying attention to this given the recent Aster pump; they’ve also added Aster liquidity
ACO_labs unveiled ACO, the AI Creative Stack built on Virtuals Protocol and powered by AcolytAI; Pay attention to the top tier videos that are about to be distributed by ACO
sire_agent wins 10 straight bets to bolster its win rate to 67%; agentic bookkeepers outerperforming the human competition
The useTria Legion sale went live - community Round is at $100m valuation as well as its KaitoAI leaderboard meaning its now across 3 infoFi protocols (Mindo + Cookie + Kaito). Guess who’s rank 1? [I like the Neo banks + payments + agents]
daydreamsagents “onchain reputation agent” tops the x402 scan most popular protocols for agentic micropayments
almanak sees $9m of net inflows in the past 3 days, as its assets under agent continue to lead agentic deFi, 10x the second place (Source: scattering_io)
MMTFinance reveals Binance + Coinbase listings; Protocols on SUI are heating up as several agentic products come to market with WalrusProtocol, TalusNetwork and more recently Caffeine AI (ICP); could we see agentic volume churn through the number 1 DEX on SUI?
$AI16Z is finalizing its move to $ELIZAOS with a 1 to 6 token split and full ticker change. Price pump and slight sell off with comms over on Farcaster
Similarly Pippin and ARC; two other AI infra projects saw similar price action and were pegged as leaders last AI boom. Limited social info on this, so if you have info drop it in the comments
Additional Resources:
Defi0xJeff: Top 10 Must Read AI Content for this Weekend PT.50 - Link
Teng: Virtuals ACP: Powering Agentic Payments Before It Was Cool - Link
eli5_defi: How ERC-8004 Brings Trust to Agent Interactions - Link
howdymerry: The Intelligent Internet: Modern Payment Networks and Agentic Commerce - Link
That’s a wrap for issue 149 of S4mmy’s Snippets. I hope you enjoyed it.
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Disclaimer: The content covered in this newsletter is not to be considered investment or financial advice. It is for informational and educational purposes only.
I hold some of the assets and have partnerships with some of the projects mentioned in this newsletter.
great work Sammy!
Thank you as always for your work!