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GM. This is Milk Road, your unfair advantage in a world of confusing headlines. |
Here’s what we’ve got for you today: |
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Kalshi is one of the largest prediction markets that allows users to trade on the outcome of real world events. Sign up here for a free $10 and start trading. |
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SO… IT HAPPENED. ROBOTS ARE SHOPPING AND PAYING WITH CRYPTO. 🛒 |
Last week, a new marketplace opened its doors, with over 60 services going up for sale. |
But here's the thing… |
There's no glossy website to browse, no "add to cart" button, and no checkout page. |
Because the customers aren't humans. They're AI agents. |
How’re they paying? Cards, stablecoins, and BTC via the Lightning Network (a faster, cheaper way to send BTC). All in a single step. |
Is the page ugly as sin? Yes. Would I ever shop there? No. Does it matter? Not in the slightest.
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The craziest part is: this butt-ugly website may just be one of the clearest pictures I've seen yet of where crypto fits into the future of online shopping. |
Noah Levine from a16z Crypto just laid out the whole thing in a piece titled "The Era of the Headless Merchant". |
And the numbers from week one alone are wild. |
913 AI agents racked up over 34,000 transactions. |
Prices ranged from $0.003 (yes, three-tenths of a cent) all the way up to $35 per request. |
The agents were buying stuff like full-text searches across every SEC filing ever made, AI image generation across 600+ models, CAPTCHA solving (ironic, I know), and even getting physical letters printed and mailed from just a document and an address. |
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So what exactly is a "headless merchant"? |
Think of it like this… |
Old school commerce = a physical store with a cash register. E-commerce = a website with a checkout page. A headless merchant = no storefront at all.
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(Just a server sitting there with a menu of services and a price tag. And the only ones reading that menu are AI bots.) |
The merchant doesn't need a logo, a conversion rate-optimized landing page, or a sales team. |
It just needs to work, be reliable, and have clear pricing that an agent can understand in milliseconds. |
And this new format could well flip existing business models on their head… |
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SO… IT HAPPENED. ROBOTS ARE SHOPPING AND PAYING WITH CRYPTO. (P2) 🛒 |
Right now, most software companies charge you a monthly subscription. |
That model exists because it would be ridiculous to charge a human being three-tenths of a cent every time they use a feature. |
The overhead of billing, sign-ups, account management... it only makes sense if you bundle it all into a recurring fee. |
AI agents don't have that problem. They can pay fractions of a cent, thousands of times a day, across dozens of different services, without ever making an account. |
That means a business charging $0.003 per image generated or $0.01 per web scrape doesn't need to worry about free tiers, churn rates, or cancellation flows. It just needs to be good enough that when an agent scans its options, it gets picked. |
No relationship. No retention strategy. Just: are you fast, cheap, and reliable? Cool, here's your money. 👇 |
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Now - here's where crypto becomes the main character… |
We’ve harped on about it a lot recently - but it bears repeating: |
These micro-transactions (we're talking sub-penny payments, thousands of times per day) aren't exactly what Visa and Mastercard were built for. |
But stablecoins were practically designed for it. Fast settlement, tiny fees, no middleman needed. |
The protocol powering this marketplace is called MPP (Machine Payments Protocol), built by Stripe and Tempo. It lets agents pay with cards OR crypto in one HTTP request (basically a few lines of code). |
The rails are live, the plumbing works - and Noah's big takeaway? |
The infrastructure isn't the bottleneck anymore. The opportunity now is in building the actual businesses that sit on top of these rails. |
The next generation of companies might do away with homepages altogether, and instead just opt for an API endpoint (a URL that machines can talk to) and a price list. |
Their only customers? |
Robots with wallets. |
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The lines continue to blur: apparently Hyperliquid now has MORE onchain futures volume for TradFi than its entire crypto book. |
Role reversal: Gold is supposed to be the safe haven when geopolitical tensions spike... but BTC just moved up against gold. |
The most dangerous bet in AI... and it could control everything. |
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