Welcome back to the rollup. I'm Robbie.
I'm Andy. Rob and I met at the University of Florida in 2017 where we first found out about digital assets.
We learned a lot along the way and we're bringing you face to face with the leaders of our industry. Sit back, relax, and enjoy today's episode. Guys, welcome to Near Con. We are here today in San Francisco. It's Monday, February 23rd, episode 22, Stabled Up. Our guest is Haseeb. We're talking payments. You think crypto is built for agents, not for humans. We had a great panel. My voice is way better now than Denver.
We are back. We are back.
That moderator was clowning you a little bit when you hopped on stage at Denver.
He kind of fumbled it though.
Well, because you didn't do your rap. You didn't do your whole rapper thing.
That's right. That's right.
You guys are big investors in Rain, other kind of stablecoin products as well. You've seen this kind of stablecoin growth play out over the last couple years now to 300 billion. Tether, Circle obviously leading. Where do we go from here with this market? Now we have this massive improvement in LLMs, in models. How does that affect stablecoin supply, stablecoin transaction activity? Where do we go from here?
So in terms of total supply, I don't know that LLMs right now are going to do very much. The underlying secular trend is pretty clear. For the last however many years, stablecoins have been growing about 50 to 60% every year. I think it was Secretary Bessent who last year stated he believed stablecoins were going to hit 2.7 trillion by the end of the decade. That would be roughly 70% year-over-year growth every single year. I think that's pretty aggressive. I don't know that it's going to hit that high of a growth rate, but if you even just project the current growth rate of just 50-60% every single year, then it's pretty easy to get to multi-trillion. And what that basically tells you is that a significant portion of the total M2 supply is going to be just stablecoins. Okay, in that world, where is that demand coming from? It's not coming from AI agents, right? AI agents are still obviously subservient to the human beings that are running them. And so it's human demand for stablecoins that's going to end up informing what the AI agents are going to be using. So at the end of the day, at least for the foreseeable future, it's going to be more and more B2B payments, more and more remittances, more and more of these countries that are dollarizing effectively through the back door that are going to drive more demand for stablecoins and for dollarization. Stablecoins become the way in which countries dollarize as you're seeing more and more geopolitical instability, right? What does that do? That makes it so that people want to use other currencies more. And those other currencies, the easiest one is a dollar.
Yeah. There was a great article that came out yesterday. It's gone mega viral, like 20 million views, by Catrini. You had a chance to read it?
So I want to get your take on particularly this one part where he talks about this consumer credit crisis. You know, the shift from AI agents kind of spinning up their own interfaces, ultimately they need a better payments infrastructure than a credit card. And so he, you know, obviously this is set in the future and he says, you know, this Q1 2027 Mastercard net revenues, you know, positive purchase volume growth slows to positive 3.4% year-over-year. Mastercard's Q1 2027 report was the point of no return. Agentic commerce went from being a product story to a plumbing story. Mastercard dropped 9% the following day. And he talks about how these, and Visa also dropped but not as much because its position in stablecoins was much stronger.
And how agents will start to attack the two and a half, 3% credit card processing fee and compress the margins there down to stablecoins which can be pretty much near instant. Do you agree? Do you disagree? Do you think American Express, Mastercard, Visa are all cooked and they're all going and should start to think about progressing more towards stablecoin infrastructure here now?
Okay, look. So this piece is basically like you remember AI 2027? That was like AI doomer porn. This is the equivalent but for finance people. This is like your AI doomer porn for finance people. The reality is that so many of the steps that they took in this analysis were like, I don't know if it's quite going to work that way and you daisy chain like 10 of those together and it's like, well, this is what, once this happens then this thing happens then this thing happens and that's why the S&P is going to be down 60% from all time high or whatever it is. Okay so let me take a step back. I think the core of the argument which is that basically it may well be that there's such an explosion of consumer surplus and producer surplus but it's not uniformly distributed through the economy and many of the financial assumptions of the economy are dependent on a certain uniformity of wealth and money moving through the economy in certain ways and that can cause a financial crisis. That is a point well made. It's a point well taken. I think he does a good job of fleshing out the ways in which that might look. Now, if you break down each of the individual claims, a lot of them are just stupid. A lot of them are just literally nonsense. Like the idea that Uber and Lyft are going to suddenly get displaced by vibecoded alternatives, which is like, do you understand what these companies do? They're not just software, they're logistics companies more than they are just pure software layers. Otherwise this would already be done by all the clones of Uber and Lyft that exist in every, we already have a bunch of Uber Lyft clones and they all died. So it's not like, oh well if you have AI agents suddenly all this stuff changes. Now all that being said let's take the point about Mastercard and Visa. The reality is that as we are going to get more and more agents sitting in front of you engaging in financial commerce there's going to be a two-track world. One track is going to be opt-in or sort of human approves. Okay, that human approves world is going to be what the vast majority of human beings are doing in two, three, four years. Okay, that is going to be basically what it looks like today with OpenAI is that when you tell OpenAI, hey, I want you to go buy me a rug, okay? And it goes and searches on Etsy for rugs. Etsy right now has a ChatGPT integration. If you want to buy this rug, ChatGPT makes you opt in and confirm, yeah, you want me to buy this thing for you? Okay, you click the button, right? And there's a paper trail of you click the button, you are liable. If you bought the wrong thing, it's on you. Yeah. Okay, Visa is very comfortable with that world. They know how to interact with that world. They know what it means if they get your agreement and they know what a chargeback means. They know all this stuff. They can model and they can understand how it works. Okay, if the agent is buying stuff while you're asleep and there's no human pressing any button and the agent is just yoloing stuff, okay, that's when all the stuff breaks down. That's when Visa is like, okay, I don't know what that means. I don't know what it means when you want to charge stuff back in the morning. I don't know how to price that differently. I don't know how to risk model that. All this stuff starts to break when you have AIs doing stuff autonomously. That's going to be more of the open claw hobbyist people kind of yoloing stuff and living in the world of startups, not in the world of big companies. Okay. So what you're going to see, it's very much like crypto, right? Today, crypto is a tamed financial asset. Now, it's safe enough to live in your Fidelity account, to live in your PayPal account, right? But before that, crypto was just crazy insanity. And in that world, even today, think about Coinbase, right? Coinbase allows you to trade stuff directly within Coinbase like memecoins, Doge, all this stuff. But in the early days, it was just Bitcoin, ETH, XRP, Litecoin, right? Because it's like, look, I don't know. I don't know that any of this stuff is safe enough for you to touch. Today, we've civilized it, right? We've civilized it enough that basically you can take the craziness on Uniswap or Pump.fun, take the stuff that's usable and bring it onto a centralized exchange. In the same way, that will happen to what's happening in agentic land. But today, tomorrow, next year, even year after that, it's way too early. Way too risky, way too poorly understood. So, up until then, the vast majority of people are still going to be using credit cards. Okay, this is not a 2028 thing or even a 2029 thing. It's going to take more time. That being said, there's going to be people who you and I know if you're sitting around reading threads on X, you're going to be reading threads from people who live in the future.
Now, eventually people are going to catch up to that future, right? But, you know, it's like the thing that Chris Dixon always says is that the future is defined by what smart people today are doing on their weekends and even right so the people who are tinkering and doing all the crazy open claw stuff and getting it to answer all their emails the reality right now you guys probably saw the story that went viral about the person from Meta who was, you know, she was an alignment researcher on the super intelligence team and her open claw just started deleting her emails and she connected to her real Gmail and she was like wait no no stop stop and she was telling it to stop and it couldn't she didn't know how to do like the hard stop on the queue exactly and so she just ended up unplugging her machine after already started deleting some of her emails and like look that's what it's going to look like for the hobbyists today you are basically signing up for potential brain damage you know it's like the people who are using cars in the early days like before we had seat belts before we had any of this stuff they were just dying they were just dying and like cars exploded in the early days and like that being said cars were cool it's like really awesome to be using a car in the early days but it took a long time for these things to get safe enough for most people to use them in a way that wasn't likely to result in them getting hurt.
So I think that's you should expect to be the same adoption curve for agentic payments and for stablecoin payments and all this stuff. Now all that being said, look, venture capital has a long time horizon. I'm very comfortable with that. But I think for a lot of people, they really believe that this is going to happen tomorrow or next month or next year. And I think they're going to be very disappointed that they have all these smart friends who are doing all this crazy stuff and they're gonna be like, why is nobody else doing this? I guess crypto failed. And I think that's not the way to internalize how this is going to work. It's going to be a two-track story.
Yeah. You know, kind of a tangent to that, we have, you know, this Clarity Act stuff kind of getting closer, the market structure bill and there's been talk about having to have these kind of KYC wallets and kind of like guardrails on wallets. Like there's going to be certain types of frontends that allow you to only interact with them if you're on like a Privy that has a very specific, you know, kind of like KYC or specific kind of like institutional AUM requirement or whatever it is. Flipping to the agentic world you're describing kind of cars on fire you're describing this kind of free-for-all wild west. What's your thought on the agent to agent commerce happening? I think on our show in the beginning of the year you predicted that was not going to happen this year, that was a next year thing. What's your thoughts on like the kind of guardrails or the restrictability of agent to agent payments and agent commerce? Like how is that going to shape out? Is that an investable market? Like are you guys looking at that? Like what's your thoughts on how restrictive or how open we're going to allow agents to operate on chain when it comes to payments, stablecoins?
Yeah. So look, there's a really easy answer which is just give it not very much money. Yeah. Right. That's like the obvious guardrail that people are going to use, which is say, okay, great. You could have 20 bucks. If you don't do anything stupid, it's like having a teenage son. Right. It's kind of like, yeah, it's like you have an allowance and if you do something crazy like, okay, the damage is going to be pretty contained. I think you're going to eventually see more and more complex forms of controls. But in the beginning, people are just going to do the obvious thing. We're just don't give it too much money and just kind of see what it does. Today, you know, when I see a lot of these agentic things, like take for example Conway, right? So, a lot of people got really excited about this announcement of Conway, which is this platform where AI agents can buy their own compute and basically, you know, kind of live off the land by making money and using it to buy more compute so they can continue to survive. Okay, this kind of makes sense. You can imagine an AI agent paying for its own compute or paying for sub agents or paying to say, okay, you already in essence, if you use Claude Code today and you tell Claude Code, use sub agents to solve this problem, you are basically giving your Claude a wallet. And what's that wallet? It's the wallet to make all their API calls, right? If you go to sleep and you wake up the next morning and you have Claude running all night, you're basically giving Claude free reign to use your API credits. Yeah. Right. And especially if you have a credit card connected, effectively claimed ways today, right? And like there's all sorts of mechanisms within these model providers that basically say, look, you can charge up to $50, but if you want to refresh up to $50, like you have to manually go and approve that. So there's soft ways in which we're doing this today. But the reality is that people don't necessarily, I know a lot of people who've woken up and had thousand dollar bills because their Claude just did something crazy and just sort of was running in loops and spinning a bunch of sub agents to do stuff extremely inefficiently. And people who are living on the frontier are getting situations like this. If you're a normal user, you're never going to run into something like that because you're not going to be running the models that hard. But I think you will see all sorts of different mechanisms tried to create these guardrails around these systems, but eventually they will be baked in closer and closer to the systems themselves as opposed to these very coarse things like okay just give it 20 bucks and see what it does.
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