PAYMENTS ARE THE NEW ADS

Summary from the TLDR Crypto newsletter

Agentic commerce has exposed a structural gap in payments: AI shopping agents have four paths to pay, each with material friction, and broken flows have deterred 60% of UK adults from trusting agent purchases after a single failure. Stripe's Instinct Balance, a prefunded stablecoin wallet, sidesteps bank authentication friction and earns Stripe ~$1.95 per $100 spent compared to ~$0.40 on virtual cards, a 4x unit-economics advantage over the network-token path. Banks have a counter through agent-authenticated network tokens modeled on Apple Pay's 2014 liability deal, but Chase has not joined any major agent platform, leaving the token infrastructure incomplete. If stablecoin balances capture agentic spend before banks resolve token liability, those funds exit bank deposits for good, shifting the customer-ownership fight from card rails to stablecoin custodians.