Why Stablecoins Won’t Kill Cards Ft. a16z Partner Noah Levine

**Noah Levine** (0:00)
There's a bit of, I feel like a skeuomorphic point of view of moving from even e-commerce to Agentic Commerce, where everyone is thinking about flows where humans are in the loop. I think where adoption is going to accelerate significantly is actually when humans are not in the loop. In AI today, I think the biggest bottleneck is actually human involvement.

**Simon Taylor** (0:28)
Welcome to Tokenized, the show focused on Stablecoins and the institutional adoption of Tokenized real world assets. My name is Simon Taylor. I'm your host, author of Intake Brain Food and head of market dev at Tempo. And back on our Agentic Commerce series is Bam Azizi, who's CEO and founder of Mesh. How are you doing, Bam?

**Bam Azizi** (0:44)
Good, good, good. Super excited for this session.

**Simon Taylor** (0:47)
Yeah, this is going to be a good one. Joining us this week is a regular guest on the main show and somewhat of a co-host these days, helping us out when Kai or I have super secret missions to do. Noah Levine, partner at a16z. How are you doing, Noah?

**Noah Levine** (1:01)
Doing great. Excited to be on the show.

**Simon Taylor** (1:03)
Yeah, excited to get into your Agentic Commerce thesis. I know you've been writing a lot lately. I know our good friend Sonal speaks very highly of some of your work as well. So before we get into all of that, I need to remind viewers and listeners that the views and opinions of our contributors today are their own and might not reflect those of companies they represent. Please don't take anything we say as tax, legal or financial advice. This is for informational purposes only. I'm very happy to remind you, of course, that this podcast is sponsored by our friends at Visa and our friends at Mesh.
This episode, if it's not obvious, is brought to you by our friends at Visa. A global leader in payments, Visa's tokenized assets platform, VTAP, uses smart contracts and cryptography to help banks bring fiat currencies on-chain. VTAP allows financial institutions to issue fiat-backed tokens, improving financial efficiency and enabling programmable finance. You can check out the links in this episode's description to express your interest in VTAP. This episode is brought to you by Mesh, the global crypto payments network. Mesh makes it possible for anyone or any agent to get paid or pay instantly from any wallet on any chain anywhere in the world. You can learn more at meshpay.com.
Noah, hit me with a thesis. Where are we on Agentic Commerce? There's no lack of hype, but where are we now?

**Noah Levine** (2:38)
Absolutely. Yeah, definitely a lot of hype. And I think, you know, as a starting point, I think we're still very early. A lot of the conversations about Agentic Commerce have really started in the last six to 12 months, especially coming out of the development of Codex from OpenAI and Claude Code from Anthropic. You know, and even just looking at the data, I think, you know, the work that Artemis did with Visa coming out with some of the data was really good work. And it shows that when you look at the adjusted volume, there's only something like 15 million in volume. A lot of that is concentrated amongst a small set of wallets. I think that being said, there's a tremendous amount of excitement right now. There's a lot of new protocols coming out, whether it's X402 or MPP.
I think there's a lot more definition around what Agentic Commerce is gonna look like, especially for some of the more developer facing use cases.
And, you know, I think that's the area that we've been spending a lot of time on and I'm most excited about. I think if you look at a year ago, a lot of the conversation around Agentic Commerce was really sort of using, whether it's Claude or whether it's Chad GBT as sort of a new discovery tool and, you know, this is how you're going to be buying sneakers or buying groceries. And while I think there's opportunity there to improve how discovery works, it was kind of unclear how payments were actually going to change. And even in some early testing from players like OpenAI and trying to embed payments within Chad GBT, like it was unclear that there was a significant amount of demand. And I think now where the direction of travel is going is, it's really more focused on you have this sort of two forces going to each other at once. On the one end, there's this whole new class of developers who maybe never written a line of code before, but now all of a sudden can build full scale applications. They need to get access to developer tooling, and they're going to want to have to pay for that. And then I think on the other side, there's a whole new class of merchants that we're seeing that are not only building tools, but then going and looking to actually sell those and figuring out how the payments works there is quite complex. So I think that's the area that we've been more excited about and where I think there's a lot of potential.