Session Recap | 🇰🇷 Seoul, Korea | 27th Sept |
Topic: Stablecoins & Agentic Payments, Why Aren't We Paying With Them Yet?
We ran two sessions back to back - and this won't be possible without our:
Moderator:
@RyanKim- Co-Founder of
@fractalyze_io, Co-leading the agentic payments with Junhyeok Yoo - Researcher of
@FourPillarsFP @FourPillarsKR
And Session Partners:
@DecipherGlobal KODA
📖 Read the summary here -
📝 Topic Overview
Stablecoin talk usually opens with the $300B market cap. We opened with a different question: what friction do they actually remove? The agent half followed the same logic. Agents already search and compare well, so we went straight to the hard part: who authorized the spend, how much, and who answers when it goes wrong.
💡 Takeaway: After the whole discussion, the hard part is no longer issuing a stablecoin or teaching an agent to sign. It’s building an economy where stablecoins get spent without routing back to a bank, and where signed delegations count as evidence in a real dispute.
Until issuers and networks accept that, a single human confirmation before payment isn’t a stopgap. Under today’s rules, it’s the sane default.
What we've covered:
✍🏻 Stablecoins win where there’s no alternative - For trade with countries cut off from correspondent banking, they’re a payment route that didn’t exist before, not a fee discount. Transfers are fast and cards are everywhere now, but companies still can’t routinely accept stablecoins, book them and convert to won.
✍🏻 For agent payments, identity is the wrong frame and authorization is the right one.
@GoogleCloud’s AP2 records what the user approved as a signed Mandate, either a reviewed cart or conditions like price and timing set in advance.
@Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP) works the merchant side by signing which registered agent is asking and for whom. Neither makes an agent a stable economic actor, because restarting the session or swapping the model breaks continuity.
So under
@Visa’s CE3.0, a merchant answers “this wasn’t me” by matching IP, device ID, user ID and shipping address against past transactions.
✍🏻 With an agent in the middle, the IP belongs to a server and the device data never arrives. Onchain adds programmable spend limits and cross-border settlement, but it’s mostly prepaid and final, which leaves credit and refunds unsolved.
