Agentic Commerce Felt Less Abstract After I Hosted This Event

From Adyen, AWS and Google’s protocol moves to BlockSec, Arkreen and Pivota’s startup wedges, the AI-commerce story is moving from AGI theater to transaction infrastructure.

Over the past few weeks, I hosted two offline events in Shanghai. My biggest realization from both is that some topics that look niche from the outside are often already at the point where many people want to ask about them, even if they do not yet know how to ask the right questions.

The first event was at BAI Capital’s office. We talked about Kraken’s acquisition of Reap, the Hong Kong-based stablecoin payments and card infrastructure company. I initially thought it would be a relatively small discussion around an industry M&A case. Why would a global crypto exchange buy a Hong Kong payments infrastructure company? Was this simply about Kraken adding payment capabilities, or was it a sign that stablecoins are moving from being assets inside crypto trading venues to becoming settlement infrastructure for real commercial activity?

I was wrong about the “small” part. Once the event went out, sign-ups quickly crossed one hundred people. The room was not just crypto people. We had people from payments, cross-border commerce, compliance, enterprise software, fintech, and investment. What people cared about was not just Kraken and Reap as one deal. They cared about the bigger question behind it: if stablecoin infrastructure companies are now being acquired by exchanges, payment companies, and financial infrastructure players, are we about to redraw the boundary between traditional payments and crypto payments again?

That deal was worth discussing. Kraken’s parent company Payward agreed to acquire Reap in a transaction worth up to $600 million, with the acquisition expected to help Kraken accelerate its card issuance and stablecoin payment infrastructure, especially in Asia-Pacific.

The second event, focused on Agentic Commerce and Agentic Payments, gave me a similar feeling.

AI is obviously the hottest topic this year. But the hotter a topic gets, the easier it becomes to talk about it in a way that says almost nothing. Agentic Commerce is a perfect example. It is now a field where large platforms and vertical infrastructure companies are all announcing, experimenting, and positioning. Yet the actual product form is still far from consensus.

That was exactly why I wanted to host this event. The point was not to tell another grand story about the AI future. The point was to demystify it.

If agents really begin to find products, call services, place orders, and complete payments on behalf of users, what exactly are the large players building? What positions are payment companies, cloud platforms, search companies, and protocol organizations trying to occupy? More importantly, where can startups enter?

This event also attracted more than one hundred sign-ups. The room was unusually mixed: AI people, payment people, crypto people, cross-border e-commerce operators, security founders, DePIN builders, hardware people, and investors. Over the past few years, these groups usually appeared at different conferences, used different language, and cared about different KPIs. AI people talked about models and agents. Payment people talked about acquiring, fraud, and compliance. Crypto people talked about stablecoins and on-chain settlement. E-commerce people talked about traffic, conversion, and supply chain.

Agentic Commerce pulled them to the same table.

The reason is simple. Once agents stop merely answering questions and begin discovering products, comparing prices, calling services, placing orders, and making payments, several previously separate layers are suddenly wired together again. AI is no longer just the front-end interaction layer. Payments are no longer merely the last step. Merchant systems are no longer just back-office tooling. Crypto is no longer just about asset trading. It may become a settlement method among software, machines, APIs, and agents.

After sitting through the whole event, my biggest takeaway was this: Agentic Commerce felt less abstract.

That does not mean the market is mature. Quite the opposite. It is still early, messy, and full of protocols and demos that will probably disappear. But it is no longer just a vague statement that “AI will change commerce.” That statement is impossible to disagree with, but also difficult to act on.

Agentic Commerce is starting to land in specific questions: merchant product data, payment interfaces, agent authorization, security and fraud, stablecoin settlement, machine wallets, and growth for mid-tail and long-tail merchants.

Once a concept begins to make different parts of the value chain reposition themselves, it deserves attention.