Stableminded · · 40 min

Ex-Google and a16z founder now building payments for AI agents

With Sam Ragsdale, Merit Systems

Key takeaways

  • Sam Ragsdale says x402scan, a registry of things AI agents can pay for, went from about a hundred listings at launch to around 50,000 today.

  • Merit Systems launched the AgentCash wallet, which lets an agent pay over x402 or MPP in USDC on Base, Solana and Tempo.

  • Ragsdale says much of the early growth came from meme coin speculation, and he expects agent payments to grow 100 to 1000x in the next five years.

Watch the episode

0:00Cold open and sponsor message1 of 10

Summary

Sam Ragsdale says AI agents will not browse or click on ads, and he wants them to pay their own way with stablecoins at checkouts open to every agent.

Merit Systems, the company led by Sam Ragsdale, says its x402scan registry now lists around 50,000 resources AI agents can pay for, up from about a hundred at launch. Alongside it sits AgentCash, a wallet an agent uses to pay for anything on x402 or MPP.

Ads stop working for agents

Sam Ragsdale notes that the web set aside status code 402, "payment required", early on, but no payment technology at the time could support it. Instead the internet ran on distraction, and he calls Google search a "$300 billion a year choke point". Agents, he says, "certainly will not get distracted along the way" and probably won't want HTML sites or browsers. He thinks walled gardens built around entertainment will be safer businesses.

“In the age of agents, agents will probably use a different search engine, they probably don't want HTML websites, they probably don't want a browser, and they certainly will not get distracted along the way.”
Sam Ragsdale

From open source to payments

Ragsdale and Ryan left two years ago to start Merit Systems. They spent about a year on a cap table for open source repositories, but tools like Cursor IDE made it "really hard to tell if contributions were high quality or slop." The team then turned to Coinbase's x402, which had handled about 2000 transactions over six months. x402scan reached 300,000 users in month one, though Ragsdale says "a lot of the early boom there was caused by speculation" from meme coins.

One wallet, two protocols

AgentCash now covers both x402 and MPP, the equivalent protocol from Stripe and Tempo. Ragsdale says the name comes from cash: a stablecoin settles right away, while cards and ACH take T plus two at best. Agents still struggle with normal checkouts, he says, because merchants carry the fraud risk and build in bot protection.

What holds adoption back

Sam Ragsdale names on-ramps as the main blocker, since consumers face KYC and businesses face KYB. He says neobanks such as Mercury are building stablecoins in directly, and he pictures "a world where every bank has stablecoins on day one."

Sam Ragsdale wants agents to work for their users, not for advertisers. He points to Amazon Rufus as an assistant tied to an $80 billion a year advertising business. Merit Systems wants every checkout open to every agent, rather than one-to-one deals between AI providers and merchants.

Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Altitude come up most.

Ask AI about this conversation

Merit Systems is an agentic commerce product house building tools for AI agents to discover services, make payments, and transact across the internet.

More from Stableminded

More conversations like this one

Get the lineup before every live show, plus the newsletter’s short reads.