When software agents do the buying, the products worth selling are the ones an agent cannot cheaply reproduce for itself. This essay works through what agents will actually pay for — permission to act, verified data, identity checks, insurance and reliance warranties, physical execution, raw compute — and argues that durable margin comes from network effects, accumulated context and process knowledge rather than from competing on price.
Slides from a guest lecture for Cryptography for Distributed Systems at TUM. The talk frames agentic commerce around five prerequisites — agent identity, delegation, credential isolation, settlement, and disputes — and sets out how the competing camps behind AP2, TAP, ACP and x402 each answer them. It then turns to keeping secrets from your own agent, by way of credential isolation and zero-knowledge proofs, and closes on compute as a commodity: attestation, verification, and paying on proof.
A running view of the market for services that agents buy. It tracks pricing bands, service categories and settlement data across Coinbase CDP Bazaar, Apify Store, x402scan and mppscan, ranking endpoints both by estimated spend and by unique payers — a demand signal considerably harder to wash-trade than raw transaction counts. Refreshed daily.