I like this idea a lot: a "separation of powers" between the Agent and the credit card company protects the consumer. We've used this for decades (centuries?) in corporate culture: a company's Accounts Payable department double checks the invoices that their other departments have authorized.

Agreeing with your immediate hunch that the traditional rails are sufficient for agentic commerce, but still finding the x402/stablecoin etc work fascinating:

Under which circumstances are the traditional rails actually off limits? Some (trivial) speculation being:

- When the beneficiary is not a traditional business but itself some sort of protocol / contract (that benefits from or even requires final settlement into eg. a stablecoin wallet, eg. to pipe those funds into downstream dependencies) - nothing with mainstream PMF here yet, but feels like the "trivial" case for those rails

- In cases where "broad commercial relationships" around low-cost txns aren't feasible -> credit risk can't be pooled, there isn't credit infra, etc -> market never clears. Global micro-payments to regions with no local acquiring/robust banking? Something else?

(yes, very guilty of solution in search of a problem thinking :))