Co-written with@0xlaguna
The next dominant economic actor isn't a company as we traditionally know it - it's software that works, earns, and compounds 24/7/365 with minimal human intervention. It doesn't just outlive its creator. It outworks them. We call these Money Machines.
We're witnessing the largest infrastructure upgrade in the history of the internet and it's being driven by two converging forces: blockchain and AI.
The internet made information programmable. Blockchains are making value programmable, and now, AI is making decision making programmable.
Each prior industrial revolution unlocked new modes of production - the assembly line scaled manufacturing, the printing press scaled knowledge, and email scaled communication. Stablecoins, tokenized assets, and autonomous agents are the next unlock, acting as the foundation for a new
internet financial system, one where agentic capital amplifies human potential at a scale never before possible.
The next dominant economic actor isn't a company as we traditionally know it - it's software that works, earns, and compounds 24/7/365 with minimal human intervention. It doesn't just outlive its creator. It outworks them.
We call these Money Machines.
Looking at what people are doing every day with@openclaw, it's hard not to realize we're in the midst of a new industrial revolution. Anyone and any business can now build purposeful autonomous agents running on accessible devices.
That means any great idea, no matter how ambitious, is now easily programmable. When we see early agentic company concepts start to earn income online, the scale of what becomes possible is unlike anything we've seen before and it's happening in real time.
That's because up until recently, economic activity has always required human presence. A transaction needed a buyer and a seller in the room (or at least on the phone). Capital sat idle at night. Markets and banks closed on weekends. Expertise was locked inside individual people who could only work so many hours. The corporation was invented to solve for this, to let capital outlive its owners and scale beyond any individual. But even corporations have their limits.
Money Machines give humans and businesses economies of scale never before seen. Agents don't sleep. They don't have jurisdictions. They don't need a paycheck deposited into a bank account. They work across time zones, serving thousands of clients simultaneously, making decisions autonomously, around the clock. They can negotiate, execute, and settle in milliseconds, at global scale.
The constraint was never knowledge. It was always the human, or business, it was trapped inside. Soon these Money Machines will become the primary unit of economic organization, just like a solo founder with an army of agents will become the norm.
The infrastructure stack is being built in real time today - frameworks like@OpenClaw, stablecoins like@USDCand@withAUSD, wallets like@privy, blockchains like@arc,@solana,@tempo, and @base, onchain financial protocols like@aaveand@Morpho, and identity systems that enable agents to participate in the economy as first class actors - and we want to fund it. The internet and finance have been on a collision course for 30 years. Money Machines are what happens when they finally collide.
If you’re a founder (or agent) building a new Money Machine, shoot us (@0xlaguna&@vaneck_us) a message. We’d love to meet you.
About Us: We're 2 ex-
@Circle
guys who love stablecoins, fintech, and internet capital markets. VanEck Ventures is a $40M early stage venture fund built in partnership with
@VanEck_US
, a $200B New York based asset management firm.
Request for Startups
01 · Agent Equity & Investment Banking
The agentic economy already runs on tokens. As agents identify opportunities, what's the most scalable way to identify, price, distribute, and make them legible to capital? Infrastructure to capitalize agent businesses - think fractional ownership of productive AI systems, revenue share tokens, onchain agent DAOs (like the real vision for DAOs) - turns these Money Machines into investable, tradable assets. If agents become the dominant economic actors, ownership of agents becomes one of the most important asset classes in history.
Examples:
@legiondotcc
02 · Compute Exchanges & Marketplaces
As agents proliferate, compute becomes a commodity that needs to be priced, traded, and allocated efficiently. We'll need financial infrastructure for GPU capacity (eg, spot markets, futures, options) that treat compute as the raw material of the agent economy and allow standardization, risk transfer, redeemability, and more. Examples:@OrnnExchange, Silicon Data, Computer Exchange, Pluto Trade,@computeindex
03 · Liquidity Operating Systems
Moving money across borders is solved. Converting it at the last mile isn't. In corridors like Nigeria, Kenya, and Mexico, PSPs are structurally short USD liquidity - settling stablecoin transactions into local fiat slowly, manually, expensively. As agents and smart contracts begin routing payments globally at scale, this bottleneck becomes the ceiling of the entire agentic economy. There's an opportunity to build a programmable, short duration liquidity infrastructure that integrates directly into payment flows, underwriting risk that's too opaque for traditional finance to touch.
04 · Agent Service Marketplace
Craigslist for agents, basically. A marketplace where individuals and businesses can deploy their expertise as a monetizable agent service (eg, legal, research, financial modeling, creative production) available to hire by other agents or humans with reputation baked into the protocol. The democratization of entrepreneurship at scale.
Examples:@crunchDAO
05 · Agent Identity & Reputation Systems
Trust is the foundational primitive of commerce. For agents to transact with other agents, and with humans, there must be a verifiable, persistent identity layer. We're looking for decentralized identity and reputation credentials for AI agents: provable track records, authorization scopes, behavioral attestations, and trust scores that accumulate onchain over time.
06 · Yield as an API
Yield still operates on banker's hours. A brokerage account, a wire, a T-1 or 2 settlement window. That model wasn't built for software, and we think software is about to become the largest capital allocator in the world. Businesses and agents accessing the token economy will need access to yield - not during business hours, not through a brokerage account, but as a programmable API call available 24/7/365.
Examples:Yield.xyz,@superformxyz
07 · Credit Infrastructure
Agents will need credit to float transactions, access working capital, and operate at scale. But agents aren't legal entities. There's an opportunity to build novel credit primitives built on stablecoins, smart contracts, and card infrastructure that extends capital to agent controlled cards and wallets, with programmable repayment and risk controls that don't require a human cosigner.
08 · Compliance Infrastructure for Tokenized Securities
The tokenization of equities, bonds, and funds is happening. What's missing is the compliance layer (eg, KYC/AML, transfer restrictions, investor verification, reporting, and regulatory interoperability) that allows tokenized securities to move at blockchain speed without breaking securities law. As agents begin managing portfolios, executing trades, and allocating capital autonomously, compliant tokenized securities become the asset layer they need to function, without a human broker in the middle.
Examples:@DinariGlobal,@0xPredicate
09 · Agentic Payment Authorization & Spending Controls
Agents need to spend money autonomously, but humans need guardrails or programmable authorization layers - like spending limits for cards and wallets, counterparty whitelists, multisig approvals - that sit between an agent's intent and a transaction's execution. Think corporate expense management, rebuilt natively for nonhuman principals operating on card and stablecoin rails.
Examples:@sponge_wallet,@privy
10 · Stablecoin Treasury & Cash Management
As stablecoins become the default global settlement layer, enterprises from startups to multinationals will need treasury infrastructure to manage stablecoin and fiat holdings: yield optimization, FX conversion, payroll, vendor payments, and regulatory reporting. Agents make this infrastructure exponentially more powerful, autonomously rebalancing treasuries, routing payments to the cheapest venue, and filing reports without a finance team in the loop. The CFO suite, rebuilt with agents.
11 · Crosschain Settlement & Interoperability for Agents
Agents don't care which chain they're on. They care about cost, speed, and finality - but liquidity is fragmented. Abstraction layers can give agents chain agnostic execution: route to the best venue, settle on the best chain, all without the agent (or its human operator) needing to manage bridges, wrapped assets, or gas tokens.
Examples:@LayerZero_Core,@ubyx
12 · Data Monetization & Provenance Networks
Agents consume data voraciously (eg, market feeds, proprietary research, behavioral signals). Infrastructure that lets data producers monetize access programmatically, with onchain provenance, usage tracking, and micropayment settlement is needed. An example being a decentralized data market where agents are buyers and human experts are sellers.
This list isn't exhaustive, it's just the start and we know we missed a ton of interesting things. If you're building infrastructure for the Money Machines economy, shoot us a note, we want to meet you.
Disclaimer:
1. This article is reprinted from [Wyatt_Lonergan]. All copyrights belong to the original author [Wyatt_Lonergan]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
2. Liability Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute any investment advice.
3. Translations of the article into other languages are done by the Gate Learn team. Unless mentioned, copying, distributing, or plagiarizing the translated articles is prohibited.
