WEBVTT NOTE Sentence-level transcript of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKzU_3riL6s NOTE One cue per sentence. Cue ids are the line anchors on /transcripts/xKzU_3riL6s.html. A cue ends where the next begins, or 2 s after its last word. s1 00:00:01.309 --> 00:00:03.309 [music] s2 00:00:12.760 --> 00:00:15.280 Good morning, everyone. s3 00:00:15.400 --> 00:00:27.040 So, um I've had the pleasure of uh meeting a lot of folks at uh the booth here over the last couple of days, and the interactions have been great, uh but s4 00:00:27.040 --> 00:00:32.880 one question kept uh coming up, which was Circle is a stablecoin company. s5 00:00:32.880 --> 00:00:37.880 So, why is a stablecoin company at an AI engineering conference? s6 00:00:37.880 --> 00:00:49.240 And well, uh the answer to that is fairly simple, because Circle issues uh USDC, which is the world's largest regulated stablecoin. s7 00:00:49.240 --> 00:00:55.960 And we've built over the years expertise in making payments simpler and cheaper. s8 00:00:55.960 --> 00:01:00.880 And it turns out that's one of the bottlenecks for your AI agents. s9 00:01:00.880 --> 00:01:19.840 So, when you often think about making AI agents smarter, we think about better models, uh more tool calls, complex orchestration, but where your agent actually in practice actually halts is when it hits a paywall s10 00:01:19.840 --> 00:01:22.200 or when it has to pay for something. s11 00:01:22.200 --> 00:01:29.960 Then you have to step in, either create an account, sign up, or, you know, manage API keys. s12 00:01:29.960 --> 00:01:37.240 So, that's where uh the limitation is, and that's the gap that I want to talk about today. s13 00:01:37.240 --> 00:01:45.080 So, yeah, I'm Harshal, and I'm an engineer on the agentic product team at Circle. s14 00:01:45.080 --> 00:01:49.720 So, let's sort of take a step back and see how we got here. s15 00:01:49.720 --> 00:01:52.800 We believe that the agentic economy is already here. s16 00:01:52.800 --> 00:02:03.800 So, how are uh you know, uh we In 2023 we interacted with agents via like prompts, uh your ChatGPT and stuff like that. s17 00:02:03.800 --> 00:02:05.280 We got a little bit better. s18 00:02:05.280 --> 00:02:07.800 In 2024 we built workflows. s19 00:02:07.800 --> 00:02:12.320 2025 was all about MCPs, skills, and orchestration. s20 00:02:12.320 --> 00:02:19.480 And we believe this year, 2026, is when agents actually start paying for services that they want. s21 00:02:19.480 --> 00:02:22.800 And the signals are promising. s22 00:02:22.800 --> 00:02:32.840 Just in the last 30 days, uh agents have transacted with paid API endpoints, uh and the volume is about like $24 million. s23 00:02:32.840 --> 00:02:35.720 Uh over X102. s24 00:02:35.720 --> 00:02:40.480 And 99% of it has been settled in USDC. s25 00:02:40.480 --> 00:02:48.959 While this number may look small in terms of volume in the broader landscape, it's only about to get larger. s26 00:02:48.959 --> 00:02:50.480 So, what is X102? s27 00:02:50.480 --> 00:03:04.600 Um essentially, X102 is a way where agents can uh pay for their the resources that they want because the server essentially returns a 402 header and with the details s28 00:03:04.600 --> 00:03:07.880 of how they want the payment to proceed. s29 00:03:07.880 --> 00:03:15.920 And then the agent just signs um an authorization from the crypto wallet and then pays for the resource and retries the request again. s30 00:03:15.920 --> 00:03:21.840 So, that's in X102 in a nutshell and we'll see that in action in a live demo. s31 00:03:21.840 --> 00:03:30.320 But then, the question is why do the traditional payment rails not work and why do the agents get stuck? s32 00:03:30.320 --> 00:03:39.840 So, the answer is simple, uh because for the last 30 years we built the internet around one customer and that was humans. s33 00:03:39.840 --> 00:03:40.360 Right? s34 00:03:40.360 --> 00:03:47.880 Um so, we built payment schemes, uh monetization strategies, all catered towards how humans interacted. s35 00:03:47.880 --> 00:03:58.440 So, you had your sign-up flows, add your credit card, uh put in your information, and manage your API keys, but agents just don't function that way. s36 00:03:58.440 --> 00:04:12.760 Agents want to like come in and grab that piece of data, resource, compute, inference, whatever, and just uh you know, and they have the ability to even like consume knowledge at a scale that humans just cannot. s37 00:04:12.760 --> 00:04:23.600 I'm sure like you have seen sessions where it's able to like just scrape through hundreds of web pages, and um then it just like stalls because it can't like reach a particular endpoint, s38 00:04:23.600 --> 00:04:25.640 and it skips over it. s39 00:04:25.640 --> 00:04:30.560 So, then you could think, "Oh, yeah, just give it a credit card." s40 00:04:30.560 --> 00:04:31.360 or something like that. s41 00:04:31.360 --> 00:04:47.520 So, while that is possible, um these agents, uh because they consume so much data as they go, it's um they pay in fractional amounts, so tiny amounts, uh but at a very high frequency. s42 00:04:47.520 --> 00:04:53.160 Uh and credit cards and their fees are just like not sustainable for this kind of like economic model. s43 00:04:53.160 --> 00:04:59.360 Um you cannot pay like 3% uh each time an agent tries to make a one-cent transaction. s44 00:04:59.360 --> 00:05:09.000 And the reason these transaction amounts are so small is because on the sell side or on the merchant side, they've realized that these paywalls were actually catered for humans, s45 00:05:09.000 --> 00:05:16.760 and now there's an entirely different customer base which is trying to like access their data, and they just want like a subset of the data. s46 00:05:16.760 --> 00:05:29.200 So, you could monetize that as a seller by just offering that, by wrapping that in a uh you know, in a paywall, and saying, "Hey, I take one, pay me 10 cents and grab this data." s47 00:05:29.200 --> 00:05:35.680 And that's why these are tiny um microtransactions, but highly frequent. s48 00:05:35.680 --> 00:05:40.320 So, because the agents are just like making these API calls constantly. s49 00:05:41.520 --> 00:05:44.200 So, what do these agents need? s50 00:05:44.200 --> 00:05:48.800 The agents need um payments to work like the internet. s51 00:05:48.800 --> 00:05:56.640 So, they have to be real time, low cost, programmable, and always on. s52 00:05:57.040 --> 00:05:59.360 And that's why we've built the Circle agent stack. s53 00:05:59.360 --> 00:06:02.960 So, it's the full stack platform for the agent tech economy. s54 00:06:02.960 --> 00:06:07.240 And what we mean by that, let's look at it with a live demo. s55 00:06:07.240 --> 00:06:10.960 Um yeah, wish me luck. s56 00:06:12.120 --> 00:06:14.120 Okay. s57 00:06:14.480 --> 00:06:24.760 So, I'll just explain uh what I'm trying to if I can get the terminal. s58 00:06:24.760 --> 00:06:26.480 Okay. s59 00:06:26.480 --> 00:06:28.480 Okay. s60 00:06:29.120 --> 00:06:33.919 Let's Mhm. s61 00:06:34.360 --> 00:06:36.640 Pull it. s62 00:06:36.720 --> 00:06:39.680 Yeah, I don't know. s63 00:06:40.880 --> 00:06:51.120 Excuse me, can I Yeah, I tried but it's just not I don't know where the placement of the desktop is. s64 00:06:52.480 --> 00:06:53.964 Can you escape out of this? s65 00:06:53.964 --> 00:06:55.964 [snorts] s66 00:07:00.440 --> 00:07:02.440 Okay. s67 00:07:06.760 --> 00:07:07.080 Thank you. s68 00:07:07.080 --> 00:07:11.040 So, so what we have over here are two sessions. s69 00:07:11.040 --> 00:07:18.400 One is your regular cloud code and on the other on the right hand side is a cloud code that comes equipped with Circle agent wallet. s70 00:07:18.400 --> 00:07:25.960 So, it has a wallet which is funded and has the ability to like make uh has the ability to pay for premium content. s71 00:07:25.960 --> 00:07:36.360 And now uh let me actually just uh quickly uh add a task to this. s72 00:07:36.360 --> 00:07:38.280 Yep. s73 00:07:38.280 --> 00:07:40.640 And run it. s74 00:07:40.640 --> 00:07:51.920 So, I'll explain what I'm trying to do over here, which is Yeah, so So, the task I'm giving Claude on and it's the same task on both the terminals is s75 00:07:51.920 --> 00:07:55.520 plan my trip for the FIFA World Cup final. s76 00:07:55.520 --> 00:08:02.600 So, just, you know, give me summary of flights, hotels, logistics. s77 00:08:02.600 --> 00:08:06.680 Also, like what are the odds of like my favorite team Argentina being in the final? s78 00:08:06.680 --> 00:08:07.800 Who is it going to play? s79 00:08:07.800 --> 00:08:09.120 And stuff like that. s80 00:08:09.120 --> 00:08:13.880 Um and also what's the ticket prices in the secondary market? s81 00:08:13.880 --> 00:08:18.520 How is the experience of other people who've actually been to the stadiums? s82 00:08:18.520 --> 00:08:22.040 And are there any FYIs and stuff like that? s83 00:08:22.040 --> 00:08:23.720 Grab all of that. s84 00:08:23.720 --> 00:08:25.160 Send me an email. s85 00:08:25.160 --> 00:08:34.680 And if possible uh make me a make a phone call and tell confirm that all of this has been researched and you know, sort of brief me on the summary. s86 00:08:34.680 --> 00:08:38.840 So, we'll see like what's happening on on both the terminals here. s87 00:08:38.840 --> 00:08:42.640 And Sorry, it's a bit hard to navigate. s88 00:08:42.640 --> 00:08:49.320 So, as you can see, um the left the vanilla Claude code has spun out like a bunch of sub-agents. s89 00:08:49.320 --> 00:08:53.400 And it's going about doing its research. s90 00:08:53.400 --> 00:09:10.080 Similarly, on the right-hand side um it's actually like uh going through the wallets and making like um paying for all of these uh premium content and we'll see like what the results of it are. s91 00:09:12.960 --> 00:09:20.040 So, as you can see, it's trying to make a phone call to find sorry, an API call to Stable and Rich. s92 00:09:20.040 --> 00:09:22.880 Um and it's paying from its wallet. s93 00:09:22.880 --> 00:09:27.200 It's set up a guardrail of like, "Hey, max amount is 15 cents." s94 00:09:27.200 --> 00:09:37.040 The beauty of uh having an agent with a wallet is you sort of build these guardrails into the wallet. s95 00:09:37.040 --> 00:09:46.840 And you don't have to as a human approve every single transaction because that would just not scale because these agents are just making these ones and five cents, 10 cents transactions. s96 00:09:46.840 --> 00:09:55.920 You want to like enforce those guardrails which is hey, this is the max amount you can send spend per session or this is the max cap you can do per day and stuff like that. s97 00:09:55.920 --> 00:10:05.400 So, the agent is still spending within the guardrails that you set but it is autonomous enough to like make these individual API calls. s98 00:10:07.320 --> 00:10:20.280 So, let me just look at what the vanilla one is looking up and doing some research for hotels. s99 00:10:22.880 --> 00:10:28.000 Yeah, um flights are coming in. s100 00:10:28.000 --> 00:10:35.800 Also like in the prompt like try to like tell the agent to wrap this whole thing up within 6 to 8 minutes in the interest of time. s101 00:10:35.800 --> 00:10:43.000 So, let's see if we're able to like get an email and a phone call done in the same time. s102 00:10:51.640 --> 00:10:59.720 Let me also walk you through what the agent's doing if I can grab. s103 00:11:05.440 --> 00:11:20.000 Yep, as you can see over here the agent was able to like make an API call to the poly market data via a provider called Block Run and it provided a query s104 00:11:20.000 --> 00:11:29.080 and again set the max amount guardrails and is now passing all the results. s105 00:11:53.120 --> 00:11:54.160 All right. s106 00:11:54.160 --> 00:12:02.360 So, let's go back to the main subject main agent here. s107 00:12:23.160 --> 00:12:23.920 Yep. s108 00:12:23.920 --> 00:12:34.400 And this is where I think you'll see on the left-hand side that the agent gets stuck because the agent just does not have the ability uh it cannot send out an email s109 00:12:34.400 --> 00:12:34.760 natively. s110 00:12:34.760 --> 00:12:44.640 So, what it's doing is it's using my uh it's just like adding a draft into my Gmail account uh that is logged in, but it just cannot send it to someone. s111 00:12:44.640 --> 00:12:54.360 Uh whereas the other agent on the right-hand side will just be able to use um a provider, pay it, and send an email. s112 00:13:00.600 --> 00:13:11.400 Now, let's see like this one's uh the the other agent is also like uh is about to like send an email and place the call, so let's see. s113 00:13:11.400 --> 00:13:13.400 Does. s114 00:13:30.320 --> 00:13:32.320 Okay. s115 00:13:32.920 --> 00:13:46.200 So, as the I think the left agent, the vanilla cloud goods finished, and as you can see, it's sort of like made a confession that yeah, it cannot have It does not have the ability to make a phone call. s116 00:13:46.200 --> 00:13:50.880 So, it's just like providing me the highlights over here in the terminal itself. s117 00:13:50.880 --> 00:13:57.840 Um and now, uh whereas on the right-hand side, the email's been sent. s118 00:13:57.840 --> 00:14:07.920 Now, let me try to actually show you the email that we got, I wish. s119 00:14:10.920 --> 00:14:14.440 Grab this somehow. s120 00:14:19.720 --> 00:14:25.200 Okay, I'm going to make make the phone call. s121 00:14:25.800 --> 00:14:27.800 Okay. s122 00:14:35.200 --> 00:14:46.320 Just going to grab my thing here, and then let's look at the email. s123 00:14:46.560 --> 00:14:52.880 So, yep, there we go. s124 00:14:52.880 --> 00:14:54.520 So, I got this email. s125 00:14:54.520 --> 00:14:55.760 Oh, this is the old one. s126 00:14:55.760 --> 00:14:58.920 Let's see the new one. s127 00:14:59.920 --> 00:15:01.160 Yep. s128 00:15:01.160 --> 00:15:05.200 This is the one that we just received like 2 minutes ago. s129 00:15:05.200 --> 00:15:15.839 And yeah, it has all the details that it was able to like find, including like getting to the stadium, open stadium and maps. s130 00:15:15.839 --> 00:15:20.520 It was able to like, you know, find all of these. s131 00:15:20.520 --> 00:15:37.800 And then, what to expect by looking at like Reddit tickets, etc. So, I'll wait for the call but in the interest of time it takes sometimes a few minutes for the call to come in s132 00:15:37.800 --> 00:15:40.920 but let's see and I'll move on. s133 00:15:40.920 --> 00:15:45.480 So, how does this work uh in the background? s134 00:15:45.480 --> 00:15:50.040 Is Yeah, let's get back to this. s135 00:15:50.040 --> 00:16:07.240 Let's Yeah, so so as you can see like the agent on the right hand side with the wallet was able to just make a bunch of these API calls and pay for it. s136 00:16:07.240 --> 00:16:19.440 While blockchains make all of these things theoretically possible, there are there are also some bottlenecks because uh even the most efficient blockchains have a gas fee and these small s137 00:16:19.440 --> 00:16:28.040 transactions just don't scale because the gas fee will again be a significant sort of fraction of the actual transaction. s138 00:16:28.040 --> 00:16:33.160 But it is important to have gas fees because they prevent the network from spam and abuse. s139 00:16:33.160 --> 00:16:42.720 Um and blockchains also have some throughput limitations because there are other use cases that run on blockchains and block space is shared infrastructure. s140 00:16:42.720 --> 00:16:47.960 So, the problem for agents is unpredictable latency and degraded performance under load. s141 00:16:47.960 --> 00:16:59.760 So, what we did for that is essentially uh we built a new um infrastructure layer on top of our intra product called gateway. s142 00:16:59.760 --> 00:17:00.960 So, it's called nano payments. s143 00:17:00.960 --> 00:17:05.199 It's built for sub cent transaction sizes for as low as one micro cent. s144 00:17:05.199 --> 00:17:12.040 Uh it supports um it is gas free for the seller and it's instantly cross-chain. s145 00:17:12.520 --> 00:17:20.439 And the way it works is you essentially you just fund um your wallet and then Oh, sorry. s146 00:17:20.439 --> 00:17:23.959 While I explain this, let's listen to the actual call that came in. s147 00:17:23.959 --> 00:17:24.480 And s148 00:17:24.480 --> 00:17:27.240 Hi Harsha, here is your World Cup final trip s149 00:17:27.240 --> 00:17:28.720 I don't know if it's part of it. s150 00:17:28.720 --> 00:17:30.240 at MetLife Stadium. s151 00:17:30.240 --> 00:17:34.080 Fly SFO to either EWR or JFK non-stop. s152 00:17:34.080 --> 00:17:37.360 SFO is showing live arrival delays today, so build buffer. s153 00:17:37.360 --> 00:17:38.960 Awesome. s154 00:17:38.960 --> 00:17:45.480 Can you tell me how do I get to the stadium from my hotel? s155 00:17:45.760 --> 00:17:51.640 On match day, take NJ Transit to Secaucus Junction, then the Meadowlands Rail Spur direct to the stadium. s156 00:17:51.640 --> 00:17:53.560 Budget about an hour before receipt. s157 00:17:53.560 --> 00:17:54.280 Thank you. s158 00:17:54.280 --> 00:17:56.320 I'll read the rest of it in my email. s159 00:17:56.320 --> 00:17:58.520 Thank you. s160 00:18:01.000 --> 00:18:01.760 You're welcome. s161 00:18:01.760 --> 00:18:03.000 Have s162 00:18:03.000 --> 00:18:03.560 All right. s163 00:18:03.560 --> 00:18:09.240 So, that was just a quick demo of like how you can have like AI agents. s164 00:18:09.240 --> 00:18:16.360 Um if they're equipped with a wallet, they can do a lot of things with the as opposed to an agent that does not have a wallet. s165 00:18:16.360 --> 00:18:23.280 So, I have a couple of more minutes, so I'll just walk you through how this technology works underneath. s166 00:18:23.280 --> 00:18:35.040 So, if you have a wallet and you funded it with USDC, it's very easy because Circle works with a bunch of providers to on-ramp your actual US dollars into USDC. s167 00:18:35.040 --> 00:18:38.440 And from there, you can deposit the funds into a smart contract. s168 00:18:38.440 --> 00:18:53.360 The next thing it does is the agent just has to like sign these off-chain authorizations, which are essentially cryptographic signatures saying, "I am paying this address this particular amount of money." s169 00:18:53.360 --> 00:19:06.800 And then the server just has to like relay this to Circle and within a few hundred milliseconds, this the server knows the merchant knows that, you know, the user has the funds s170 00:19:06.800 --> 00:19:10.320 and is able to release the actual resource that the agent requested. s171 00:19:10.320 --> 00:19:23.600 And with this, you avoid the issue of like you know latencies and stuff that are associated with actually settling every single transaction on chain and this the agents are able to like pay s172 00:19:23.600 --> 00:19:26.640 for things at the speed at which they operate. s173 00:19:26.640 --> 00:19:38.160 So in conclusion the the the way the stack would work is you have Circle agent wallets which give you the ability to equip your agents with wallets. s174 00:19:38.160 --> 00:19:45.640 The agents have can now hold their money, spend that money autonomously but within the guardrails that you set. s175 00:19:45.640 --> 00:19:59.040 The wallets enforce those guardrails and then on the sell side the merchants are able to like just wrap their endpoints and resources and monetize it with a few lines of code using our SDKs. s176 00:19:59.040 --> 00:20:10.400 Then USDC and nano payments is the layer underneath it which sort of helps settle these transactions at the speed at which agents operate which is sub second. s177 00:20:10.400 --> 00:20:20.360 So and that this is how it scales and you can give it a try yourself by going to agents.circle.com. s178 00:20:20.360 --> 00:20:31.200 It's just a couple of clicks and you will have your agent equipped with a wallet and ready to like you know make these phone calls and things like that. s179 00:20:31.200 --> 00:20:33.920 So yeah, thank you.