About a decade ago, a famous Business professor looked at Uber, then valued at $17B as a private company. Even assuming Uber captured 100% of the US taxi market, his math didn’t get anywhere near that number. He concluded Uber was overvalued.
Bill Gurley, a General Partner at Benchmark (an early Uber backer), fired back. His main point: the professor’s critical mistake was assuming the TAM stayed fixed. When you remove friction, markets expand. Opening your phone to hail a ride in two minutes is a completely different product than hoping to flag a cab on a street corner.
Fast forward 10 years and Uber is worth ~$200B, about 10x higher so its safe to say Gurley was right. I love this story because it shows how making something easier can create massive first, second, and third-order effects on demand.
I think we’re about to see the same thing happen with agents. Most of the current conversation is about human-agent interaction (tech support, booking flights, etc.). But the real unlock will be the agent-agent economy. Agents can transact with each other 24/7, making millisecond-level decisions at global scale. This economy could be hundreds or thousands of times bigger than the human economy.
What makes this possible?
- AI infrastructure (more chips, more energy)
- Smarter, cheaper models
- Payments (instant, low-fee transactions)
That last piece is crucial. Agents need seamless payments. This is where crypto, and especially stablecoins, come in. Blockchains like Base, Solana, or Ethereum L2s make micro-transactions feasible.
Coinbase understands this better than anyone. They recently launched x402, an open protocol for internet-native payments. It revives the unused HTTP 402 status code to let you pay for resources directly through APIs—no registration, no OAuth, no messy signatures. And because it’s literally HTTP, every client already supports it.
Vercel recently created a Nextjs starter showing how x402 works and I used it to build NickelJoke, a fun little app where you can buy a joke for a nickel using USDC on Base testnet. With Stripe this would have been impossible (the transaction fee alone is at least a nickel).
Stablecoins unlock true microtransactions. Imagine charging an agent a cent to read your blog, or giving an agent $10 to transact with others toward a goal. The agent-to-agent economy is just getting started and people who understand these protocols early will have a huge advantage.
bilater•4mo ago
Bill Gurley, a General Partner at Benchmark (an early Uber backer), fired back. His main point: the professor’s critical mistake was assuming the TAM stayed fixed. When you remove friction, markets expand. Opening your phone to hail a ride in two minutes is a completely different product than hoping to flag a cab on a street corner.
Fast forward 10 years and Uber is worth ~$200B, about 10x higher so its safe to say Gurley was right. I love this story because it shows how making something easier can create massive first, second, and third-order effects on demand.
I think we’re about to see the same thing happen with agents. Most of the current conversation is about human-agent interaction (tech support, booking flights, etc.). But the real unlock will be the agent-agent economy. Agents can transact with each other 24/7, making millisecond-level decisions at global scale. This economy could be hundreds or thousands of times bigger than the human economy.
What makes this possible? - AI infrastructure (more chips, more energy) - Smarter, cheaper models - Payments (instant, low-fee transactions)
That last piece is crucial. Agents need seamless payments. This is where crypto, and especially stablecoins, come in. Blockchains like Base, Solana, or Ethereum L2s make micro-transactions feasible.
Coinbase understands this better than anyone. They recently launched x402, an open protocol for internet-native payments. It revives the unused HTTP 402 status code to let you pay for resources directly through APIs—no registration, no OAuth, no messy signatures. And because it’s literally HTTP, every client already supports it.
Vercel recently created a Nextjs starter showing how x402 works and I used it to build NickelJoke, a fun little app where you can buy a joke for a nickel using USDC on Base testnet. With Stripe this would have been impossible (the transaction fee alone is at least a nickel).
Stablecoins unlock true microtransactions. Imagine charging an agent a cent to read your blog, or giving an agent $10 to transact with others toward a goal. The agent-to-agent economy is just getting started and people who understand these protocols early will have a huge advantage.
You can find the starter code here: https://github.com/vercel-labs/x402-ai-starter