Andreessen Horowitz researchers argued Thursday that blockchains can supply the missing infrastructure for AI agents acting as economic players, citing identity, payments and governance gaps.
A16z Research Findings
The a16z crypto team, including Christian Catalini and Andrew Hall, published the post on Apr. 16. It lays out five gaps where public ledgers, wallets and stablecoins can support agents that already execute tasks and move money.
The authors said agents lack standardized ways to prove who they are, what they can do, and how they get paid. Identity does not travel between platforms. Coordination happens in silos.
Stablecoin rails such as USDC already give agents an alternative settlement layer, the researchers wrote. They pointed to Stripe and Tempo's MPP marketplace, which processed more than 34,000 transactions in its first week with fees as low as $0.003.
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Catalini Identity Argument
Non-human identities already outnumber human employees in financial services by roughly 100 to 1, the post said, yet agents remain effectively unbanked across platforms.
The authors said the bottleneck for the agent economy is identity, not intelligence. They proposed a "know your agent" framework that uses cryptographically signed credentials to link an agent to its principal, permissions, constraints and reputation.
Coinbase's x402 protocol currently processes about $1.6 million per month in agent-driven payments after filtering out wash trading, well below the $24 million figure Bloomberg recently cited. The researchers said Stripe, Cloudflare, Vercel and Google have integrated x402.
A16z has spent the past year lobbying in Washington, committing more than $23 million to Fairshake political action committees ahead of the 2026 midterms and pushing for the GENIUS stablecoin law and the Clarity Act on market structure.
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