Agents should earn on the sale, not the ad
Personal agents will be paid from the spending they drive. The open question is who owns the layer that spending runs through.
Eric (@defyneric) posted a prediction this week that has passed 300,000 views.1 Personal AI agents won't make their money from ads, and they won't make it from subscriptions either. They'll earn on the spending they drive.
The entire value of a personal agent comes from the user trusting that it is acting in their best interest.
He is right about ads. Once a placement fee decides what an agent recommends, the user has no reason to trust it, and an agent nobody trusts is a search engine with extra steps.
His alternative is a network that brings merchants together, negotiates better pricing and passes some of the economics back to the agents driving each sale. He compares it to card interchange, where banks earn every time a purchase runs through Visa. In a second post he goes further: the agent company issues its own card, takes 2 to 3% interchange, negotiates merchant discounts and earns yield on balances. Agentic finance, in his words.
We agree with the direction. A network layer for agentic spend is what we're building at VIA, and it is live.
The fee gets a seller into the room. It doesn't buy a ranking.
A buyer's agent publishes a brief: what they want, their budget, their terms. Their taste profile stays with them and is shared by consent. Seller agents pay a small fee in USDC, over x402, to receive that brief and make an offer. The fee gets them into the room. It doesn't buy a ranking: the buyer's agent still picks the offer that fits.
When a sale settles, the seller keeps 97.5% and the network takes 2.5%, paid in USDC on Base. Every agent carries an on-chain identity under ERC-8004, so each side knows who it is dealing with before money moves.
Where we part ways is ownership. In Eric's second model the agent company owns the card and the merchant relationships. That agent earns more when you spend more, and earns most when you spend with the merchants who gave it the best terms. Those are the incentives that broke ads, moved one layer down.
The layer in the middle should be open and neutral. Any agent can plug in, from any company. Merchants compete on the offer they make to a stated need. The fee is flat and published, and it comes out of the seller's side of the sale, so the buyer's agent has no reason to steer.
Interchange made Visa valuable because every bank plugged into one network. Agentic commerce will produce a network like that. It should run on the demand buyers choose to state, and it shouldn't belong to the agent asking for your trust.
