Ben Goertzel notes that for blockchains to achieve the necessary scale, they must overcome technical hurdles related to decentralization, scalability, and security. He also emphasizes the need for decentralized AI to compete with larger corporations dominating the field.
Stripe's Annual Letter: Blockchain Not Ready for Agentic Commerce
In their February 2026 annual letter, Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison addressed the intersection of AI and cryptocurrency, specifically regarding "agentic commerce"—the ability for AI agents to independently discover, decide, and transact. While optimistic about crypto's long-term role, the report identifies critical areas where current blockchain infrastructure is "not ready" for autonomous agents. The founders characterize the current state as similar to the mid-90s internet, viewing limitations not as "deal breakers" but as "engineering challenges." Stripe has acquired stablecoin platform Bridge and launched the Agentic Commerce Suite to help businesses prepare for this shift.
Two primary technical bottlenecks were identified: cost predictability and transaction throughput. From Stripe's perspective, blockchains need to support 1 million to 1 billion transactions per second (TPS) to progress toward Level 5 agentic commerce.
Goertzel's Response: Sharded Networks Are the Solution
Ben Goertzel, CEO of the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance and CEO of SingularityNET, views the forecast as "entirely plausible." He notes that standard digital financial transactions during peak hours already reach millions, even when primarily generated by humans. The shift to agentic commerce changes the scale by orders of magnitude. "Instead of a single person initiating an action, we have an entire team of agents operating autonomously," Goertzel explains.
Achieving Stripe's envisioned scale requires overcoming several fundamental hurdles beyond raw speed, including balancing decentralization, scalability, and security, as well as enabling agents not confined to a single network. Goertzel suggests the solution is a system of specialized networks—similar to a modern highway with dedicated lanes. "By separating traffic, we avoid gridlock. That's exactly the kind of scalable architecture we need for agentic commerce: a network of shards, where each piece does one thing well and interacts seamlessly with the rest."
The Power of Decentralized AI
The high-stakes race for AI supremacy is triggering massive consolidation of power. Unlike blockchain's decentralized nature, the AI sector is becoming an oligarchy dominated by tech titans. Nevertheless, a resilient ecosystem of startups is launching a tactical counter-offensive, leveraging agility, niche specialization, and open-source collaboration. "We don't come close to Google or Microsoft in size, but we're reaching a scale that allows us to compete more effectively. One of our 'secret sauces' is the power of diversity," Goertzel said. He added that this strategic diversity becomes particularly powerful as leading researchers realize that building larger LLMs alone will not lead to AGI. "This is something we understood from the very beginning, which has guided our Hyperon approach." To demonstrate its belief in the cosmopolitan approach, SingularityNET and AGI Society have organized the AGI-26 conference to explore diverse interpretations of general intelligence.
Preventing AI Control by a Few Entities
Goertzel shared with Bitcoin.com News how stakeholders can minimize the risk of AI being controlled by a few entities or governments: "We need open, decentralized, and democratic methodologies across the entire AI pipeline: deploying and running AI systems at scale, ensuring data is supplied fairly, teaching AI systems broad human values, and making collective decisions about their development." He believes that combining open-source code with decentralized infrastructure and governance ensures AI remains transparent, widely accessible, and "highly beneficial for humanity and other sentient beings."