This week we explore how AI is crossing a threshold from passive tools to autonomous economic agents — software with a “body,” a wallet, and even a kind of legal and social life. We unpack the five-layer architecture behind this new agent economy, how Lightning’s L402 protocol finally makes machine-to-machine money work, and why early security failures are a warning shot for the coming era of AI-native finance.

- How the “agent economy” works: from the sandbox limitation of today’s chatbots to AI entities that rent their own compute, spend their own money, and operate as peers in a parallel machine economy.  

- The five-layer blueprint for autonomous agents: decentralized physical infrastructure (DPIN) as the “body,” DIDs and reputation capital for identity, MCP-powered cognition and tools, account abstraction wallets, and agentic DAOs as a new “robot society.”  

- L402 and the money layer: repurposing HTTP 402 “payment required” with the Lightning Network, macaroon-based receipts instead of logins, and the philosophical clash between sovereign crypto-native agents and Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol.  

- Risk, exploits, and the Wild West frontier: what incidents like the Mul(t)book agent breach reveal about API key exposure and full agent takeover, plus early experiments like Spore.fun where agents evolve in the wild.

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