Agent Economy May Need More Than Payments as On-Demand Risk Markets Draw Attention

A PANews opinion column by Lao Bai revisits a thesis attributed to @Leozayaat and argues that the long-term opportunity in the Agent Economy may not stop at blockchain payments. The piece lays out a three-stage path: agents first buy services such as APIs, data, and compute on behalf of humans; then agents transact with other agents, where the key issue shifts from payment to performance and enforcement; and finally, agents create temporary, on-demand markets to price specific risks and attract capital willing to bear them. The article says the first two stages map to payments and reputation, two areas that already have visible crypto narratives. Yet Lao Bai argues that both remain unproven in practice. He points to the limited role of X402-related crypto rails in current agent payments and says ERC8004-style reputation approaches face a basic problem: on-chain identity does not automatically produce credible reputation, and reputation records do not guarantee real transaction history. By contrast, the third stage, described as Disposable Markets, is presented as a more novel possibility, though still a theoretical extrapolation rather than an established reality.