The API economy may soon grow by tens of millions of customers—here’s why

First gradually, then all at once. That’s how the emerging field of “agentic commerce” is starting to feel. I wrote about agentic commerce, which describes the idea of AI agents carrying purses of digital money to spend on our behalf, barely a month ago. But a series of recent developments suggest this new frontier of shopping is snapping into place sooner than expected—and that it could be a lot bigger than we imagine.

I spoke with Sam Ragsdale, a former a16z guy, whose startup is building a service called AgentCash that helps AI agents pay for premium APIs and other data. He is not a crypto diehard but told me that blockchains, with their instant settlement and tiny per-transaction costs, are the obvious technology to facilitate mass micro-payments.

That doesn’t mean it will work. The idea of using blockchain for micropayments has been kicked around for years, but failed to gain traction. The difference now, though, is the emerging field of AI commerce, which Ragsdale says is poised to add tens of millions of ordinary consumers to an API economy that has historically been limited to a relatively small pool of developers. This emerging group of new users, Ragsdale says, will likely include salespeople paying their agents to make API calls to collect data about new leads, rather than doing this by means of expensive software subscriptions.

It’s also easy to imagine people like me using agents capable of micropayments to buy snippets of financial data locked behind paywalls. Like........

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