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An emerging use-case is a bank account for AI agents. I read that Coinbase 'Base' Ethereum layer2 is popular for AI banking.

• ses1984 3mo ago
  Or you could just give your agents a debit card number loaded with only as much money as you specify.
  • sfmz 3mo ago
    You spin up agents and want them to paid without opening a bank account... or spin-up hundreds of agents... or your country isn't very well integrated with western banking rails. I think there is more to consider.
    • ses1984 3mo ago
      You don’t need to open a bank account to get a prepaid debit card.
      • mothballed 3mo ago
        The amount of money you can load or receive into a debit card is limited without doing enough KYC overhead you could have gotten a bank account with the same effort. If you try automating bots to do KYC for debit cards what you'll be doing is basically looking like a money launderer and get all your accounts shut down.
      • lxgr 3mo ago
        This is highly country dependent. Anonymous prepaid cards aren't as widely available as you might think, and often they have very high user-paid fees.
        • ses1984 3mo ago
          Maybe it’s just my lack of imagination, but I don’t see a use case for giving agents money when they can barely be trusted to not break out of a sandbox and cause hallucinatory chaos. Let’s say for a minute this is a failure of my imagination. Does each sub agent really need to be able to independently transact?
          • lxgr 3mo ago
            I could see a future in which ad-funded web sites charge agents some tiny amount per request instead of outright blocking non-human visitors. Besides, you're already effectively giving agents money (tokens aren't free, and agents decide when to stop consuming new ones), this is just more explicit :)
            • ses1984 3mo ago
              Why not have sub agents talk to a payment service? Sub agents should ultimately be associated with a human or business entity, the human or business entity could provide a single payment service for agents.
      • derangedHorse 3mo ago
        Which reloadable debit cards have no KYC requirements?
        • ses1984 3mo ago
          Do you want each sub agent to be able to anonymously transact? KYC is probably particularly important in this space and it should be easily traceable to a human.
          • jambalaya8 3mo ago
            I used to work in fintech (back when Glass Steagall was a thing people cared about), and I am sort of perturbed by modern KYC requirements. Do they make sense for large transactions? Could be, not that any of that stops fraud from corporations or firms committing it; it just hides the fraud and places the onus on those less able to hide their funds in offshore locations or convertible currencies (like crypto) and metals (not that the average American would have much of that). Do we need KYC for reloadable cards under a certain dollar amount though? I don't think so. We need a new tier of regulation to account for the fact that a lot of online transactions occur which do not fit a 'gift card' model but do not feel as comfortable with a 'forever identity' attached (for instance music subscriptions, recurring application payments, perhaps donations). A prepaid debit card with a limit of $500 or $1000, maybe, that anyone can get, like the old GreenDot cards but with a lower threshold and the ability to set a pin. Basically as much as someone might carry around in cash, or a week or so of what someone might make at a 'not high wage' job. Not everyone wants a bank account, or an account at a place that is not a bank account, and often people with those want an alternative to just cash. We should not be so willing to sacrifice our possible pseudoanonymity; have we learned nothing from ad serving?
  • sunshine-o 3mo ago
    I believe with x402 and USDC you can pay as low as $0.000001 per HTTP request with no fees. The existing "credit card" infrastructure is not designed to compete with that. Now some actors like Paypal could have come up with an HTTP 402 standard and implementation 25 years ago but they never did. I am not sure why.
    • jallmann 3mo ago
      > I believe with x402 and USDC you can pay as low as $0.000001 per HTTP request with no fees. On-chain transactions are still not free. x402 isn't settled in batches or rolled up anywhere AFAIK, so large volumes of tiny payments are still not cost-effective. Facilitators such as Coinbase only subsidize transactions up to a point: https://docs.cdp.coinbase.com/x402/core-concepts/facilitator https://docs.cdp.coinbase.com/x402/core-concepts/facilitator There are ways around this, but with tradeoffs.
  • lxgr 3mo ago
    If you're fine with the usual 0.20 - 0.30 USD of processing fees, you definitely can. Cards work well for many things; micropayments are not one of them.
• pants2 3mo ago
  I recently set up an agent with a Base wallet and made a few x402 API calls. Pretty convenient!