The modern financial system was designed to govern human accounts, human identity, and human-paced transactions. A new class of economic actor is emerging: autonomous software agents capable of searching, deciding, executing, and settling economic activity without human intervention.
This development does not represent a new financial product. It represents a change in the kind of entities participating in the economy.
Markets are shifting from institution-centered coordination to software-mediated coordination. The existing equilibrium has destabilized. A new one has not yet settled.
Financial intermediation is a solution to human constraints. Clearinghouses reconcile siloed ledgers. Custodians safeguard assets. Broker-dealers intermediate between buyers and sellers. Settlement cycles accommodate reconciliation delay and counterparty risk.
These structures exist because trust between strangers requires enforcement, and coordination across institutions requires mediation.
Software-native actors alter the coordination problem.
When verification, execution, and settlement occur natively at the protocol layer, institutional mediation is no longer structurally required for every transaction. Intermediation shifts from structural necessity to optional service.
Moats tied to reconciliation, custody, and trust enforcement weaken when those functions migrate to the substrate, not through competition but through migration.
For a software agent to function autonomously in economic space, it requires three primitives:
A verifiable identity
Scoped execution authority
Native, programmable settlement
Wallet architecture and stablecoins supply all three at the protocol layer, without requiring institutional intermediation.
When identity, authority, and settlement are native to the system, economic participation no longer depends on a human container.
This is the actor-model transition in its simplest form.
When securities and real-world assets migrate on-chain, issuance, settlement, and collateralization collapse into a programmable layer.
This affects institutional roles.
Clearinghouses lose exclusive reconciliation control.
Custodians lose monopoly custody authority.
Broker-dealers lose mandatory intermediation status.
Exchanges lose exclusive venue centrality.
Institutions may persist. Pricing power compresses. Structural necessity shifts.
The question becomes whether regulation adapts to a software-native coordination layer or compels software actors to operate within human-centric containers.
Policy debates typically operate along a spectrum: more regulation versus less regulation, centralized versus decentralized control.
Autonomous software agents do not occupy a position on that spectrum. They challenge the assumption that the actor is human.
Calls to “just be a bank” presuppose that legitimate financial action must flow through institutional forms reducible to human principals. That presupposition is ontological, not regulatory.
The deeper question is not how to regulate financial actors.
It is what qualifies as one.
Large-scale structural transitions follow recognizable patterns.
Equilibria destabilize when coordination shifts. Incumbents deploy enforcement mechanisms to slow adoption. Adoption either reaches sufficient density to refreeze the system around a new substrate or is absorbed into legacy frameworks.
Research on convention shifts suggests that once a committed minority reaches sufficient network density, rapid norm change can occur. The mechanism is coordination cost, not persuasion.
Whether software-mediated settlement crosses that threshold remains an empirical question.
Recent developments suggest substrate migration is underway.
Agent-specific wallet infrastructure has been deployed for machine-to-machine settlement.
Protocol-level reliability enhancements have strengthened execution guarantees.
Stablecoin balances on major exchanges have reached record levels, expanding programmable liquidity pools.
These indicate that the substrate is no longer theoretical, not that the transition is complete.
Programmable money introduced substrate-level settlement.
Tokenization introduces substrate-level capital formation.
Autonomous agents introduce substrate-level decision-making.
Together, they challenge the assumption that humans and human institutions are the sole primary economic actors.
When the actor model changes, the coordination architecture changes with it.
The system is in transition. The next equilibrium has not yet formed.
The modern financial system was designed to govern human accounts, human identity, and human-paced transactions. A new class of economic actor is emerging: autonomous software agents capable of searching, deciding, executing, and settling economic activity without human intervention.
This development does not represent a new financial product. It represents a change in the kind of entities participating in the economy.
Markets are shifting from institution-centered coordination to software-mediated coordination. The existing equilibrium has destabilized. A new one has not yet settled.
Financial intermediation is a solution to human constraints. Clearinghouses reconcile siloed ledgers. Custodians safeguard assets. Broker-dealers intermediate between buyers and sellers. Settlement cycles accommodate reconciliation delay and counterparty risk.
These structures exist because trust between strangers requires enforcement, and coordination across institutions requires mediation.
Software-native actors alter the coordination problem.
When verification, execution, and settlement occur natively at the protocol layer, institutional mediation is no longer structurally required for every transaction. Intermediation shifts from structural necessity to optional service.
Moats tied to reconciliation, custody, and trust enforcement weaken when those functions migrate to the substrate, not through competition but through migration.
For a software agent to function autonomously in economic space, it requires three primitives:
A verifiable identity
Scoped execution authority
Native, programmable settlement
Wallet architecture and stablecoins supply all three at the protocol layer, without requiring institutional intermediation.
When identity, authority, and settlement are native to the system, economic participation no longer depends on a human container.
This is the actor-model transition in its simplest form.
When securities and real-world assets migrate on-chain, issuance, settlement, and collateralization collapse into a programmable layer.
This affects institutional roles.
Clearinghouses lose exclusive reconciliation control.
Custodians lose monopoly custody authority.
Broker-dealers lose mandatory intermediation status.
Exchanges lose exclusive venue centrality.
Institutions may persist. Pricing power compresses. Structural necessity shifts.
The question becomes whether regulation adapts to a software-native coordination layer or compels software actors to operate within human-centric containers.
Policy debates typically operate along a spectrum: more regulation versus less regulation, centralized versus decentralized control.
Autonomous software agents do not occupy a position on that spectrum. They challenge the assumption that the actor is human.
Calls to “just be a bank” presuppose that legitimate financial action must flow through institutional forms reducible to human principals. That presupposition is ontological, not regulatory.
The deeper question is not how to regulate financial actors.
It is what qualifies as one.
Large-scale structural transitions follow recognizable patterns.
Equilibria destabilize when coordination shifts. Incumbents deploy enforcement mechanisms to slow adoption. Adoption either reaches sufficient density to refreeze the system around a new substrate or is absorbed into legacy frameworks.
Research on convention shifts suggests that once a committed minority reaches sufficient network density, rapid norm change can occur. The mechanism is coordination cost, not persuasion.
Whether software-mediated settlement crosses that threshold remains an empirical question.
Recent developments suggest substrate migration is underway.
Agent-specific wallet infrastructure has been deployed for machine-to-machine settlement.
Protocol-level reliability enhancements have strengthened execution guarantees.
Stablecoin balances on major exchanges have reached record levels, expanding programmable liquidity pools.
These indicate that the substrate is no longer theoretical, not that the transition is complete.
Programmable money introduced substrate-level settlement.
Tokenization introduces substrate-level capital formation.
Autonomous agents introduce substrate-level decision-making.
Together, they challenge the assumption that humans and human institutions are the sole primary economic actors.
When the actor model changes, the coordination architecture changes with it.
The system is in transition. The next equilibrium has not yet formed.
Support jonathancolton.eth
The Actor Model Transition
Support jonathancolton.eth
The Actor Model Transition
The New Common Sense
Own Your Work. Own Your Audience. Own the Web.
The Rise of the Distribution-First Founder
For decades, founders followed the same script: build a product, raise a round, then worry about customers later. In the 2010s, the script evolved—thanks to the Lean Startup playbook—into “ship an MVP, test for traction, raise a round, then prep your GTM.” It was faster, leaner, but distribution was still left at the end of the process. But even this MVP-first approach kept the hardest part—finding customers—pushed to the back of the journey. That gap is what a new type of founder is closing....
The Physics of Distribution
How attention becomes motion.
The New Common Sense
Own Your Work. Own Your Audience. Own the Web.
The Rise of the Distribution-First Founder
For decades, founders followed the same script: build a product, raise a round, then worry about customers later. In the 2010s, the script evolved—thanks to the Lean Startup playbook—into “ship an MVP, test for traction, raise a round, then prep your GTM.” It was faster, leaner, but distribution was still left at the end of the process. But even this MVP-first approach kept the hardest part—finding customers—pushed to the back of the journey. That gap is what a new type of founder is closing....
The Physics of Distribution
How attention becomes motion.
>200 subscribers
>200 subscribers
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
2 comments
February 11, 2026: @coinbase introduced Agentic Wallets powered by x402. Programmatic identity. Scoped execution authority. Native settlement. No human approval loop. Finance was built for human accounts and human-paced coordination. Software agents now possess the primitives required for autonomous economic participation. The actor-model transition is operational. The prior equilibrium is destabilizing. A new one is forming. What happens when the system’s primary participants are no longer human? This brief examines that shift. https://paragraph.com/@jonathancolton.eth/the-actor-model-transition?referrer=0xe19753f803790D5A524D1fD710D8a6D821a8Bb55
This is huge. If agents can handle transactions on their own, finance could move faster than ever. Curious to see how humans and AI will work together in this new on-chain world.