I just came across Cloudflare’s announcement about Wallets:
My first reaction was: this is a very creative idea, yet it feels obvious, because if AI agents are going to act on our behalf, they will eventually need their own identity, permissions, and payment capabilities.
I’m trying to understand what this actually means in practice, and what could change.
Cloudflare mentions concepts like “sell/pay headlessly” and “agentic commerce”. If this vision becomes reality,
What will the user experience look like when transactions happen between agents and services instead of humans and websites? How will websites and online businesses adapt to this change?
Does a wallet represent a new type of identity and account system for machines, or is it just another payment mechanism?
Is this solving a fundamentally new problem, or can existing accounts, APIs, and payment systems evolve to handle it?
What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions.
To me, for now, this still very feels like nothing more than just another layer of abstraction around digital payment, but I do feel like this could be a glimpse of a future chaotic internet in the future where agents completely overwhelm internet traffic, transactions are forwarded along chains of agents (both safe and malicious) and currency, at least online for digital services, data and API access, slowly descends into more abstraction than real value.
The internet is becoming so much less and less concrete and tangible these days.
You’re right. Maybe it’s just stacking another layer of abstraction onto an internet that was already pretty chaotic.
Imagine agents as the primary customers: we won’t see ads anymore, but rather machine-readable promotions, with millions of APIs all competing for your agent’s attention: “Call me, I’m 0.001% cheaper!” or “My reputation score is higher!”
The “noise” will shift from human chatter and pop-ups to APIs shouting micro-incentives. It’s no longer about convincing a human to click, but about convincing an autonomous wallet to route the next request. The chaos of the marketplace is just moving down a layer, into the logic of the machines themselves.
The separation of account wallets for people and organisations, virtual wallets and identities for AI agents, providing guardrails seems like a good idea.
However, it may become an unregulated machine to machine ecommerce. With the speed, volume, and velocity of micro transactions, fortunes could be made and lost in an instant.
That’s a good point. I actually thought about regulation when I wrote the original post, but didn’t mention it because I assumed some kind of regulatory framework would eventually catch up.
The guardrails seem to constrain what an individual agent is allowed to spend or do, but that is quite different from putting safeguards around an agent economy as a whole. x402 makes that especially interesting. As I understand it, its current payments are irreversible, i.e, a refund is essentially a new payment from the seller rather than a built-in reversal or chargeback.
I don’t have much experience with stock trading, so this may be an imperfect analogy. Could machine-to-machine ecommerce eventually need something like circuit breakers? Maybe it’s not a market-wide halt, but things like transaction speed limits or temporary pauses at the wallet or payment-infrastructure level.
I’m also curious whether regulating machine-to-machine ecommerce would be fundamentally much harder than regulating the economy we already have. Agents could obviously transact much faster, across borders, and through long chains of other agents. But machine transactions might also be more structured and auditable. So perhaps the difficulty is not only more regulation, but figuring out where that regulation should live.
I think the timescale would be the issue. There cannot be a human in the loop. Even a small bug that redirects in an infinite loop or drives back and forth a few times will create ripple effects that won’t be auditable.
Circuit breaks will need to enforce strict rate limits, based on each agent and each session. Each transaction will require unique cryptographic tokens generated at the source. This may mean funds cannot move until they are cleared.
With traditional systems, an administrator can be alerted to a price spike over the course of an hour. With machine to machine networks that timeframe will be milliseconds. At the moment about $350 is transferred each second. By 2030 the average could range from $95,000 to $158,000 per second.