At Davos in January 2026, Brian Armstrong found himself face-to-face with America’s biggest bank chiefs. Jamie Dimon was the bluntest: he walked up mid-conversation and told Armstrong he was “full of shit.” It looked like a fight about regulation and yield. It wasn’t.
Underneath the policy dispute, a structural shift is underway that makes the entire confrontation look like an argument about the arrangement of deck chairs. A new class of economic actor is arriving: autonomous software agents that search, decide, execute, and pay without human involvement. The financial system was built to govern human accounts, human identity, and human-paced transactions. It was not built for software actors that operate continuously, programmatically, and at machine speed.
The question is not which industry wins the policy fight. The question is what happens when the system’s primary participants are no longer human.
Davos, late January 2026. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is having coffee with former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon walks up, points a finger in Armstrong’s face, and says: “You are full of shit.”
Dimon was angry about Armstrong going on television and accusing banks of sabotaging crypto legislation. The rest of Wall Street backed his play. Bank of America’s CEO gave Armstrong 30 minutes and told him to “just be a bank.” Citi’s CEO gave him less than a minute. Wells Fargo’s CEO wouldn’t speak to him at all.
Reported by the Wall Street Journal, the episode was framed as industry conflict: traditional finance versus crypto, incumbents versus insurgents. That framing is accurate on the surface and completely insufficient underneath.
What looks like an industry dispute is actually a systems collision. The visible fight is over who controls the rules. The hidden shift is that the rules assume a type of participant the system is about to have less and less of: humans acting directly.
The FDIC’s national average rate for checking accounts is 0.07%. Coinbase offers around 4% on USDC stablecoin holdings. Same dollars. Same basic function. The difference is that banks have spent decades building a regulatory architecture that lets them keep the spread.
That gap is what it costs consumers to let incumbents run the system. Banks aren’t arguing that they offer a better product. They can’t. So they’re trying to make a better product illegal.
The CLARITY Act, the market structure bill that stalled in Congress, included provisions that would effectively ban Coinbase from offering yield to customers. Banks warned that if customers shifted to higher-yielding stablecoins, it would threaten $6.6 trillion in deposits that fund their lending operations. The argument was framed as systemic stability. The substance was competitive protection.
Armstrong pulled Coinbase’s support for the bill on January 14, 2026, the night before a scheduled Senate Banking Committee markup. The committee postponed the vote indefinitely. The crypto industry’s super PAC, Fairshake, holds $193 million for the 2026 midterms. Coinbase is its largest single backer, having poured $75 million into the 2024 cycle alone. Passing comprehensive legislation now requires industry support to move forward.
This is not new. Rockefeller bought senators. The railroad barons owned state legislatures outright. JP Morgan personally bailed out the U.S. Treasury in 1895 and dictated the terms. The East India Company ran foreign policy for the British Empire. The mechanism—money buying influence over rule-writing—is identical across every institutional transformation in history.
What’s different is the visibility. Fairshake’s war chest is public record. The game is the same. The transparency is new.
Every major shift follows the same pattern. Speculative frenzy. Crash. Then the real fight over who controls the institutional framework. Crypto had its crash. What’s happening now is the rule-writing phase. Incumbents always try to force new technology into old frameworks.
“If you want to be a bank, just be a bank” is the same sentence dressed up for 2026.
Everything above is the visible layer. It makes headlines and generates heat. But it’s the wrong story.
The real transformation is happening underneath the policy fight. And it makes the entire Davos confrontation look like two people arguing about traffic laws while someone else is building an airplane.
AI agents are beginning to search, decide, execute, and pay—autonomously. That breaks the design assumptions of the current financial system, which was built around human identity, accounts at institutions, periodic settlement, legal contracts, and manual approvals.
Dan Romero, co-founder of Farcaster and now building stablecoin payment infrastructure at Tempo, describes the problem in system-design terms. Credit cards are static, reusable credentials designed for humans at checkout counters. They assume a person is present, a browser is open, and a form gets filled out.
“A credit card is kind of like a private key. Having that get prompt-injected out is maybe not the best thing in the world.”
That’s not a UX flaw. It’s an architectural one. Cards assume one human, one identity, one instrument. Agent systems don’t work that way.
“If you have agent swarms, the idea of spinning up a new credit card for each sub-agent doesn’t make sense.”
Wallets do. With wallets, you can spin up as many as you want and manage the balances for each agent programmatically. That’s a fundamentally different economic container. Not accounts attached to institutions, but programmable balances attached to software processes.
An AI agent that can provision services, call APIs, manage infrastructure, and make economic decisions needs three things: programmatic identity, programmatic permission, and programmatic money. Stablecoins and wallets provide all three.
One wallet per agent or sub-agent. Balance limits are set in code. Per-call micro-settlement. No chargebacks. No human approval loop. Commerce becomes embedded inside software workflows.
Romero describes the transition mechanically. APIs are already micro-priced. Usage is per call. Settlement is monthly only because payment rails are slow and human-centric. The end state is where every single API call can just pay some amount of stablecoins in the background and keep moving. Payment collapses into the execution layer of software.
Today, code kicks you out to a browser to sign up for services. The end state is different. The agent finds a stablecoin-native service, signs up, pays, and keeps moving. The agent is unblocked as long as it has money to spend.
Stablecoins in this model aren’t fintech products competing with banks. They’re infrastructure. The economic API layer of the internet. The money primitive software uses the way it already uses compute and bandwidth.
When the legal system recognized corporations as economic actors, institutions had to adapt. Autonomous software agents with wallets represent the next version of that shift. A new type of participant, the system was not designed to govern.
That is the new economic actor.
Banks are defending a system built for humans, institutions, accounts, and periodic settlement. The emerging economy is increasingly composed of agents, wallets, continuous settlement, and machine-native workflows. That is not a competitive challenge. It’s a design mismatch between eras.
Dimon can influence policy. He cannot stop software architecture from evolving.
While executives argue about legislation, engineers are redesigning the economic plumbing. Wallets are programmatic containers. Balances are scoped in code. Payments collapse into execution loops. APIs are already priced per call—settlement just hasn’t caught up yet.
That’s not a financial product shift. That’s money becoming part of how software runs.
The battlefield is shifting from law to protocol.
AI is rewriting what work means. Crypto is rewriting what money means. Agentic systems are rewriting what organizations mean. They reinforce each other. Previous revolutions hit one front at a time. This one hits finance, labor, and organizational structure simultaneously.
The incumbents’ playbook was built for sequential threats. That world is over.
The old guard doesn’t lose because they’re stupid. They lost because their advantage was never the product. It was the rules. And those rules assume humans are the primary economic actors.
That assumption is broken.
Jamie Dimon can yell at Brian Armstrong about stablecoins. He cannot yell at software agents. He cannot make them fill out forms. He cannot make them wait for invoices. He cannot force them into instruments designed for a person at a checkout counter.
Agents will use wallets. Wallets will use stablecoins. Payments will happen at machine speed because software systems demand it.
The confrontation at Davos wasn’t the main event. It was a tremor. The financial system was built to govern human accounts, human identity, and human-paced transactions. It now faces participants who do not behave like humans at all.
When the system’s primary participants change, the frameworks built for the previous ones don’t bend.
They break.
—
Sources: Wall Street Journal (Ramkumar, Tokar, Heeb); FDIC National Rates, January 2026; Axios (Fairshake PAC);
Dan Romero, co-founder of Farcaster, now at Tempo; via TBPN.
Marc Andreessen, Lenny’s Podcast, January 29, 2026
At Davos in January 2026, Brian Armstrong found himself face-to-face with America’s biggest bank chiefs. Jamie Dimon was the bluntest: he walked up mid-conversation and told Armstrong he was “full of shit.” It looked like a fight about regulation and yield. It wasn’t.
Underneath the policy dispute, a structural shift is underway that makes the entire confrontation look like an argument about the arrangement of deck chairs. A new class of economic actor is arriving: autonomous software agents that search, decide, execute, and pay without human involvement. The financial system was built to govern human accounts, human identity, and human-paced transactions. It was not built for software actors that operate continuously, programmatically, and at machine speed.
The question is not which industry wins the policy fight. The question is what happens when the system’s primary participants are no longer human.
Davos, late January 2026. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is having coffee with former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon walks up, points a finger in Armstrong’s face, and says: “You are full of shit.”
Dimon was angry about Armstrong going on television and accusing banks of sabotaging crypto legislation. The rest of Wall Street backed his play. Bank of America’s CEO gave Armstrong 30 minutes and told him to “just be a bank.” Citi’s CEO gave him less than a minute. Wells Fargo’s CEO wouldn’t speak to him at all.
Reported by the Wall Street Journal, the episode was framed as industry conflict: traditional finance versus crypto, incumbents versus insurgents. That framing is accurate on the surface and completely insufficient underneath.
What looks like an industry dispute is actually a systems collision. The visible fight is over who controls the rules. The hidden shift is that the rules assume a type of participant the system is about to have less and less of: humans acting directly.
The FDIC’s national average rate for checking accounts is 0.07%. Coinbase offers around 4% on USDC stablecoin holdings. Same dollars. Same basic function. The difference is that banks have spent decades building a regulatory architecture that lets them keep the spread.
That gap is what it costs consumers to let incumbents run the system. Banks aren’t arguing that they offer a better product. They can’t. So they’re trying to make a better product illegal.
The CLARITY Act, the market structure bill that stalled in Congress, included provisions that would effectively ban Coinbase from offering yield to customers. Banks warned that if customers shifted to higher-yielding stablecoins, it would threaten $6.6 trillion in deposits that fund their lending operations. The argument was framed as systemic stability. The substance was competitive protection.
Armstrong pulled Coinbase’s support for the bill on January 14, 2026, the night before a scheduled Senate Banking Committee markup. The committee postponed the vote indefinitely. The crypto industry’s super PAC, Fairshake, holds $193 million for the 2026 midterms. Coinbase is its largest single backer, having poured $75 million into the 2024 cycle alone. Passing comprehensive legislation now requires industry support to move forward.
This is not new. Rockefeller bought senators. The railroad barons owned state legislatures outright. JP Morgan personally bailed out the U.S. Treasury in 1895 and dictated the terms. The East India Company ran foreign policy for the British Empire. The mechanism—money buying influence over rule-writing—is identical across every institutional transformation in history.
What’s different is the visibility. Fairshake’s war chest is public record. The game is the same. The transparency is new.
Every major shift follows the same pattern. Speculative frenzy. Crash. Then the real fight over who controls the institutional framework. Crypto had its crash. What’s happening now is the rule-writing phase. Incumbents always try to force new technology into old frameworks.
“If you want to be a bank, just be a bank” is the same sentence dressed up for 2026.
Everything above is the visible layer. It makes headlines and generates heat. But it’s the wrong story.
The real transformation is happening underneath the policy fight. And it makes the entire Davos confrontation look like two people arguing about traffic laws while someone else is building an airplane.
AI agents are beginning to search, decide, execute, and pay—autonomously. That breaks the design assumptions of the current financial system, which was built around human identity, accounts at institutions, periodic settlement, legal contracts, and manual approvals.
Dan Romero, co-founder of Farcaster and now building stablecoin payment infrastructure at Tempo, describes the problem in system-design terms. Credit cards are static, reusable credentials designed for humans at checkout counters. They assume a person is present, a browser is open, and a form gets filled out.
“A credit card is kind of like a private key. Having that get prompt-injected out is maybe not the best thing in the world.”
That’s not a UX flaw. It’s an architectural one. Cards assume one human, one identity, one instrument. Agent systems don’t work that way.
“If you have agent swarms, the idea of spinning up a new credit card for each sub-agent doesn’t make sense.”
Wallets do. With wallets, you can spin up as many as you want and manage the balances for each agent programmatically. That’s a fundamentally different economic container. Not accounts attached to institutions, but programmable balances attached to software processes.
An AI agent that can provision services, call APIs, manage infrastructure, and make economic decisions needs three things: programmatic identity, programmatic permission, and programmatic money. Stablecoins and wallets provide all three.
One wallet per agent or sub-agent. Balance limits are set in code. Per-call micro-settlement. No chargebacks. No human approval loop. Commerce becomes embedded inside software workflows.
Romero describes the transition mechanically. APIs are already micro-priced. Usage is per call. Settlement is monthly only because payment rails are slow and human-centric. The end state is where every single API call can just pay some amount of stablecoins in the background and keep moving. Payment collapses into the execution layer of software.
Today, code kicks you out to a browser to sign up for services. The end state is different. The agent finds a stablecoin-native service, signs up, pays, and keeps moving. The agent is unblocked as long as it has money to spend.
Stablecoins in this model aren’t fintech products competing with banks. They’re infrastructure. The economic API layer of the internet. The money primitive software uses the way it already uses compute and bandwidth.
When the legal system recognized corporations as economic actors, institutions had to adapt. Autonomous software agents with wallets represent the next version of that shift. A new type of participant, the system was not designed to govern.
That is the new economic actor.
Banks are defending a system built for humans, institutions, accounts, and periodic settlement. The emerging economy is increasingly composed of agents, wallets, continuous settlement, and machine-native workflows. That is not a competitive challenge. It’s a design mismatch between eras.
Dimon can influence policy. He cannot stop software architecture from evolving.
While executives argue about legislation, engineers are redesigning the economic plumbing. Wallets are programmatic containers. Balances are scoped in code. Payments collapse into execution loops. APIs are already priced per call—settlement just hasn’t caught up yet.
That’s not a financial product shift. That’s money becoming part of how software runs.
The battlefield is shifting from law to protocol.
AI is rewriting what work means. Crypto is rewriting what money means. Agentic systems are rewriting what organizations mean. They reinforce each other. Previous revolutions hit one front at a time. This one hits finance, labor, and organizational structure simultaneously.
The incumbents’ playbook was built for sequential threats. That world is over.
The old guard doesn’t lose because they’re stupid. They lost because their advantage was never the product. It was the rules. And those rules assume humans are the primary economic actors.
That assumption is broken.
Jamie Dimon can yell at Brian Armstrong about stablecoins. He cannot yell at software agents. He cannot make them fill out forms. He cannot make them wait for invoices. He cannot force them into instruments designed for a person at a checkout counter.
Agents will use wallets. Wallets will use stablecoins. Payments will happen at machine speed because software systems demand it.
The confrontation at Davos wasn’t the main event. It was a tremor. The financial system was built to govern human accounts, human identity, and human-paced transactions. It now faces participants who do not behave like humans at all.
When the system’s primary participants change, the frameworks built for the previous ones don’t bend.
They break.
—
Sources: Wall Street Journal (Ramkumar, Tokar, Heeb); FDIC National Rates, January 2026; Axios (Fairshake PAC);
Dan Romero, co-founder of Farcaster, now at Tempo; via TBPN.
Marc Andreessen, Lenny’s Podcast, January 29, 2026
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.
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5 comments
I was tuned into @gmfarcaster hoping to catch @MLeeJr chat with @adrienne & @nounishprof, when someone mentioned that @dwr was on @tbpn yesterday. I switched over mid-stream. Dan started laying out where money is going in an agent world, wallets, stablecoins, software paying software, and it snapped something into focus for me. The Davos confrontation suddenly looked smaller. Jamie Dimon walked up to Brian Armstrong, pointed a finger in his face, and said, “You are full of shit.” Other bank CEOs told him to “just be a bank,” gave him less than a minute, or wouldn’t talk to him at all. Everyone framed it as banks vs crypto. Incumbents vs insurgents. The usual war. That’s the surface story. Underneath, something bigger is happening: AI agents are becoming economic actors. They search, decide, execute, and pay autonomously. They don’t have identities in the human sense. They don’t open bank accounts. They don’t fill out forms. The financial system we have was designed for humans at checkout counters. These aren’t humans. Dan put it cleanly: a credit card is a static credential designed for a person. Hand that to an AI agent swarm and you’ve got a security and scaling disaster. Wallets change the model, one per agent, balance limits in code, payments at machine speed. Writing this is how I make sense of what we’re experiencing in real time. New essay: The New Economic Actor When the financial system meets participants it wasn’t designed for. https://paragraph.com/@jonathancolton.eth/the-new-economic-actor
So wait — because we mentioned TBPN (and we said nice things about @dylanabruscato) you left us to watch dwr’s interview? 🤣 ok moving forward we will only be mentioning other podcasts AT THE END of the show lol
😂 It's all your fault Prof. And thank you.
that’s hilarious—and you’re welcome
It’s all about the float. Be prepared to dive