EP. 244 - Getting Started with Agentic Payments on Crossmint

Alex Rawitz (0:00)

In the earliest innings, everyone sort of kind of assumed, yeah, at some point, agents will probably pay for things. But as soon as Muse and Instinct came out, like really back to back, and even in those like that first week, one of the first things that Muse suggested gave you three things. It was like, let me check your email, let me do X, let me buy you something. It was like, oh my God, here's the inflection point.

And we went from like, agents will probably buy something to one day to, oh, of course agents are going to shop for us.

Narb (0:29)

Welcome to the DevNTell Podcast, where founders, hackers and anyone in between showcase their products built on the bleeding edge of tech. GM, GM, welcome to the show Alex. I'm excited to have you on today, man.

Alex Rawitz (0:42)

Thank you for having me. It's always so exciting to talk about what we're building here at Crossmint. And I just genuinely love telling more people about what the future is going to look like.

Narb (0:53)

Absolutely, absolutely. And yeah, today's topic and what you guys are building, it's really a emerging space right now. Everyone's really hot on what models are coming out every week. But I think we're at a point where I think we have enough intelligence that people can start building things on top of it. And yeah, payments are a big one.

Alex Rawitz (1:19)

But it's funny you put it that way. I actually was at a dinner with a bunch of AI folks last night, and there were a lot of us kind of sitting at one part of the table saying, do we need these things to get that much smarter? Or are we still just like, we still have to just mine deeper to figure out what are all the ways that we can put this incredible intelligence that we already have to the optimal work? So yeah, I think that like the tools that are already in place are incredibly capable and we're ready to build some really cool things with it.

Narb (1:54)

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I've seen my fair share of that as well. But before we get into all that great stuff, would you just like to give a introduction about yourself?

Alex Rawitz (2:03)

Absolutely. So I've been in the tech world now for almost 15 years. I worked at a startup accelerator. I was moved on to work at an IoT company, building hardware and software to remotely monitor telecom sites.

It was actually while I was at that company in 2016 that I read some of the early work thinking about how Ethereum and smart contracts could be used to enable machine commission payments. And that's what kind of sent me down my Web3 journey. Back then was the idea. I had known about Bitcoin for a long time and was interested in it. But the idea that we could make money more programmable and let machines control money was one of the original things that got me interested in this space. I went on to work at Chainalysis for almost three years, but then left Chainalysis to start my own company. I built a protocol called Demo, where we were putting machine identity on Chain and had the dream of eventually getting into machine payments as well.

Although we were solving a bunch of other problems around data management and data verification. And after five years of building Demo, I left Demo to come work in Crossmint and then lead Agent Payments here at Crossmint. So it's been a journey that has taken me in and out of the Web3 world, it's taken me in and out of payments, it's taken me in and out of a few of these different areas, but somehow I always find myself intersecting with how is money getting more and more programmable and how are non-human actors going to move money?

Narb (3:38)

Absolutely. Yeah, that's quite the amazing journey. Yeah, I think you landed in a great spot as I believe that this intersection of blockchains and AI, I think, is a natural fit.

I mean, we haven't been able to get humans quite on board with using wallets and private keys, but all these things are kind of very well set up for AIs to be able to understand and kind of work with. So it is what it is. But yeah, I suppose from that standpoint, like we know a lot of people, probably people like you and I and the others watching today, we know a lot of agentic products are heavily developer oriented. And I think that's just like the near-term opportunity and it's what people are paying for now. But a lot of people don't realize that agents will also eventually start to spend online and kind of do the extensions of ourselves. And I guess for the person watching today, that doesn't kind of realize that. Did you want to kind of give an overview of what your perspective is of that and whether or not we should be giving agents our credit card to spend our money?