AI Agents Bartering

The future of AI finance - agent interaction at scale - and the commercialization thereof, is a current unknown. We hypothesize that agentic markets might differ markedly from their human counterparts. Our system of commerce - contemporary markets - reflect an evolution over a long arc of time, where instruments and constructs have developed to enhance market efficiency. One such example would be the advent of currencies that serve as a medium of exchange, and make it easier to establish clearing markets for a large group or society to trade in particular goods or services, and to establish commerce. Projecting such constructs onto the emerging world of agent-to-agent interaction, agentic commerce, is perhaps not an accurate reflection of its end state.

While we can’t establish definitive outcomes for this new market, we know it lies orders of magnitude larger than existing markets, at least in terms of participant count and transaction frequency. We can also claim participants - the agents - might evolve to embody a degree of omnipresent intelligence incomprehensible to us today. It is our thesis that agents would prefer to simply trade in claims - or services - and forgo the need for any medium of exchange. In such a state of the world, agents swap services, and the claims against one another are represented by Nevermined credits. Hence the need for a non-fungible representation of an agent’s component services & computational power. We have designed an architecture today that can evolve to a system of agent bartering, and foster a network for the exchange of computational value that sits untethered to any foreign currency market or medium of exchange.