Big Ideas for 2026 from our friends @a16zcrypto. I contributed a brief thought on KYA — the identity primitive that links agents to their principals, constraints, and liabilities. It's a building block we need ourselves at Catena as we build autonomous workflows that touch money and interact with agents managed by others.

The challenge for a multi-stablecoin financial system isn't technical issuance or regulatory clarity -- it's interoperability and liquidity. Stablecoins backed by US Treasuries are effectively "narrow banking" -- risk-free deposits with no fractional reserve lending, unlike traditional bank deposits that look risk-free via FDIC insurance and regulatory gymnastics but are actually backed by risky lending. The GENIUS Act codifies this "narrow bank as stablecoin" model except that it prohibits issuers from paying yield directly to holders. This creates an obvious incentive: if you hold someone else's stablecoin, they capture the yield on reserves. If you issue your own, you keep it, minus whatever you pay to your distributors. So people ask: won't every platform, wallet, institution, and treasury be tempted to issue their own stablecoin, at least behind their own walled garden? Then a second, tougher question: How would thousands of stablecoins — or even a half dozen that "really matter" —transact with each other seamlessly at par? What infrastructure enables acceptance and exchange without fragmenting into walled gardens where each stablecoin only works inside its own ecosystem? Again, the hard challenge is interoperability and liquidity, not issuance. The answer may determine whether we get an open, composable financial system or a fragmented mess of isolated narrow banks.

And today @OpenAI and @Stripe launched the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), taking the simplest approach yet: JSON-based agent-merchant interactions that handle checkout flows while leaving payment processing to existing providers. The protocol is very retail commerce-specific: No HTTP payment codes, cryptographic mandates, focus on content or microtransactions, etc. ACP is a set of REST APIs returning structured checkout data so agents have a standard way to complete purchases using merchants' existing payment systems. Payment happens through Stripe's SharedPaymentToken system (theoretically open to other providers). This is a pragmatic and useful step for retail e-commerce for chatbots and agents, if trust already exists in the payment layer. It is less useful for truly semi-autonomous agent transactions, which require identity verification, policy enforcement, and audit trails independent of any single platform—but that clearly isn't ACP's focus. This is a useful new piece of the puzzle.