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When Bots Have Bank Accounts: The Rise of the Agent Economy (With Sean Neville, Catena Labs)

Episode Summary

When AI agents start earning, spending, lending, and investing, the internet’s money layer needs to evolve fast. Sean Neville—cofounder of Circle, architect of USDC, and now cofounder of Catena Labs—lays out his thesis for an agent-native economy built on programmable dollars and “AI-native banks.”

Episode Notes

What happens when AI becomes the primary economic actor? 

In this conversation, Sean Neville (cofounder of Circle, architect of USDC, and now cofounder of Catena Labs) shares his vision for the next phase of the internet: an agent-native economy powered by programmable dollars and AI banks. 

As stablecoins put dollars on internet rails, a new question emerges: what happens when AI agents start earning, spending, lending, investing — and even managing our assets — on our behalf? 

From KYA (“Know Your Agent”) to programmable spending policies to secure agent communication standards, this conversation explores the foundational layers that must be built before AI can safely participate in the global economy. 

Sean breaks down: 

• Why he believes AI agents could become the dominant economic participants
• What an “AI-native bank” actually is (and why we’ll need one)
• The missing infrastructure required for safe agent-to-agent payments
• How cryptography can encode trust directly into software
• Why current financial risk systems are designed to block bots — and what needs to change
• The fragmented race to define standards for agent identity, payments, and communication-
• Lessons from building Circle and launching USDC
• Why he doesn’t love the term “stablecoin”

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