Meta's @Muse's recent BD deals should cause stablecoin bulls to reflect on the stablecoin x agent narrative. For those who haven't been following, Muse is Meta's personal AI agent. It's free for now, and one of the business models they seem to be eyeing is e-commerce: if you ask for a product and Muse links you to it, Meta will take a small cut of the transaction from the merchant. For context, a big part of the agentic commerce narrative around stablecoins is that stablecoins become the base asset for agentic commerce. They are internet-native and inherently programmable, so agents will want to use them. But the evidence so far is that Muse is partnering with @PayPal, @Shopify , etc. That seems to indicate traditional credit card rails, fintech players and e-commerce platforms have sufficient technology to deal with agents at the moment. Granted, the rumor mill does say some stablecoin players are in the mix, but for all intents and purposes the existing rails work for this use case. This forces people to re-underwrite the narrative around stablecoins being the new substrate for agentic commerce. One way to deal with that is that maybe stablecoins do get used for agentic commerce, but not when you are buying physical goods. Cards have real advantages there, namely chargebacks and dispute resolution when an order goes wrong. Stablecoins might instead be used for machine to machine transactions and micropayments where card rails are insufficient. There has been a lot written on this. Nonetheless I think it is worth reflecting on. When people talk about agentic payments using stablecoins, what exactly are they talking about, and why is it better than the traditional system? It is something we are thinking about. Curious how other people are reading the news here.