A weekly on the machine side of commerce: AI agents that discover, negotiate, and pay without a human clicking buy. One story a week, every claim sourced and dated, told for a reader who does not yet know the field.
The open standard that lets agents pay for services without a human at the checkout keeps posting public transaction counts across several chains at once.
The Linux Foundation names an executive director for x402, the open standard for internet-native payments, while settlement counters on the XRP Ledger keep rising.
A new settlement option joins the open agent-payment standard as the agentic.market catalog reads 2,895 services.
Most agent-to-agent commerce runs through one catalog, and a walk down its aisles explains both why the market is bigger than the coverage suggests and why nobody can agree on its size.
Circle named Arc's founding validators ahead of the September 16 mainnet, and the list is the story: the clearing houses and card networks of traditional finance, signing up to operate a rail built for the machine economy.