Part 1 - When the Agent Pays: Stablecoins, Machine-Speed Transactions, and What B2B Payments Looks Like Next

When agents are the ones initiating transactions, the requirements for the underlying rails change completely. Speed, programmability, 24/7 availability, and critically, security architecture & compliance logic stop being features and start being prerequisites.

An agent can't wait for a settlement window. It can't navigate a correspondent banking chain. It can't reconcile a failed payment manually. Stablecoins are the only settlement layer that currently meets the operational requirements of machine speed commerce — and that's not a crypto argument, it's an infrastructure one.