Key takeaways
Alchemy acquired HeyMint, the NFT launchpad co-founded by Flor Ronsmans De Vry, which he says sold something around $38 million of NFTs.
AgentCard uses a partnership with Visa to turn a user's existing card into virtual cards for agents with spend limits, category locks and merchant locks, and Visa enforces those limits.
Flor Ronsmans De Vry says the shift underway is from delegating tasks to delegating outcomes, and he expects every company to be transacting through agents.
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Summary
After joining Alchemy through the HeyMint acquisition, Flor Ronsmans De Vry is building Visa-based virtual cards so AI agents can buy things within limits that users set.
Alchemy acquired HeyMint, the NFT launchpad co-founded by Flor Ronsmans De Vry, which he says sold something around $38 million of NFTs. He is now at Alchemy building AgentCard, a product that gives AI agents payment methods, an email address and a phone number so they can act and transact online.
From NFTs to agents
Flor Ronsmans De Vry says HeyMint worked with artists and brands before its mission and Alchemy's lined up, and the two sides decided it would be a force multiplier to join forces. In his words, "that's how we landed here."
The idea for AgentCard came from a failed experiment. Flor Ronsmans De Vry says the team gave its credit card to one of its agents "and bad things happened," so they decided to build a way for agents to exist and transact securely online. He argues that AI is good at deciding what to do but was missing the pieces to act.
“We actually gave our credit card to one of our agents and bad things happened. So we decided that we really needed to build a way for agents to exist and transact securely online.”
Flor Ronsmans De VryLimits enforced by Visa
Through its Visa partnership, AgentCard takes in an existing card, from Capital One or another bank, and creates virtual cards that never expose the real card details to agents. Users can set spend limits, category locks and merchant locks. Flor Ronsmans De Vry says Alchemy does not enforce those limits itself: "who's actually enforcing this is Visa."
He says card rails are needed because large retailers like Amazon "are not going to adopt stablecoin rails overnight."
Snacks and parking tickets
Flor Ronsmans De Vry says early traction came from people without a technical background who used agent harnesses to automate entire businesses and recurring procurement. Alchemy itself uses an agent every week to pick office snacks from the DoorDash catalog.
He also pays San Francisco parking tickets by sending a photo to his agent on Telegram; the agent has a browser and an agent card "and just goes and pays for it." He says businesses want their agents in Slack, while consumers lean toward Telegram.
Getting started
For newcomers, Flor Ronsmans De Vry recommends starting with anything bought manually on a recurring schedule, and he points to platforms that can spin up agents within seconds.
Flor Ronsmans De Vry describes a move away from agents that write plans for humans toward agents that complete those plans and deliver the outcome. In his view, identity and payments are the basic building blocks agents need to get there, and he hopes to see every company transacting this way soon.
Alchemy, Telegram, DoorDash, and HeyMint come up most.
- People
- Flor Ronsmans De Vry
- Zach Fowler
- Drew Rogers
- Companies
- Alchemy
- Telegram
- DoorDash
- HeyMint
- Amazon
- Slack
- Capital One
- Apple
- Visa Ventures
- Dfns
