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Today’s Menu

• Payment giants rush to give AI agents direct access to your credit cards

• Bitcoin emerges as economic safe haven while US economy contracts under tariff pressure

Markets

TODAY IN AI

Payment giants rush to give AI agents direct access to your credit cards

In a move that fundamentally reshapes consumer financial relationships, Visa and Mastercard have simultaneously unveiled systems enabling AI agents to make autonomous purchasing decisions using consumers' credit cards. These competing platforms—Visa's "Intelligent Commerce" and Mastercard's "Agent Pay"—create direct financial relationships between AI systems and payment networks, removing humans from transaction execution.

Visa's initiative involves partnerships with leading AI companies including Anthropic and OpenAI to create AI-ready cards with tokenized credentials, allowing artificial intelligence to identify products, compare options, and complete purchases without direct user involvement in each transaction. While consumers can establish initial spending limits and conditions, the system requires sharing purchase data to "help personalize shopping recommendations"—effectively feeding transactional information back into AI systems for further behavioral analysis.

Mastercard's parallel "Agent Pay" platform similarly embeds payment capabilities directly into AI conversations, enabling seamless transitions from product exploration to completed purchases within AI interactions. This development coincides with shopping-focused enhancements from ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Amazon, and other platforms increasingly focused on commercial transactions.

What makes these developments particularly significant is how they shift commercial agency from humans to algorithms. Rather than AI simply recommending products for human consideration, these systems now complete the entire purchase cycle autonomously. This represents a fundamental evolution from e-commerce, where humans retained final purchasing decisions, to "AI commerce" where machines initiate and complete financial transactions based on interpreted user preferences.

The strategic timing of these announcements suggests increasing competition between payment networks to establish dominance in the emerging AI commerce landscape. By creating the infrastructure for AI-driven transactions now, these companies are positioning themselves to capture transaction fees from the anticipated explosion in algorithmic purchasing—even before AI agents have fully proven their capabilities. This preemptive move indicates both the financial industry's expectations for rapid AI advancement and their determination to maintain control over payment rails as commerce increasingly shifts toward autonomous systems.

^{Today In Crypto}

Bitcoin emerges as economic safe haven while US economy contracts under tariff pressure

The U.S. economy has contracted for the first time in three years, shrinking 0.3% in the first quarter as President Trump's reciprocal tariff policies begin impacting broader economic activity. This economic deterioration has produced the worst first 100-day stock market performance for a presidential administration since 1974—yet amid this traditional market weakness, Bitcoin has demonstrated remarkable resilience, gaining nearly 15% in April alone.

Trading platform Robinhood's latest financial results highlight this divergence, showing overall market cooling in the year's first quarter while cryptocurrency revenue doubled compared to the same period last year. This pattern suggests a significant shift in investor behavior as cryptocurrency increasingly functions as a safe haven alongside traditional hedges like gold and the Swiss franc.

James Butterfill, Head of Research at CoinShares, notes that "despite recent waves of weak macroeconomic data pointing to both recessionary risks and rising inflation, bitcoin has shown remarkable resilience, outperforming the Nasdaq by 11% since 'Liberation Day' on April 2." This performance divergence indicates Bitcoin's emerging role as a hedge against economic uncertainty rather than merely a risk asset.

Market dynamics appear increasingly influenced by expectations of Federal Reserve policy shifts. "A disappointing payroll figure on Friday—which we see as likely—could be the final nail in the coffin for Powell, paving the way for more dovish policy from the Fed," Butterfill suggests. Such expectations have temporarily recoupled Bitcoin with equities as markets anticipate potential rate cuts.

Meanwhile, Ethereum faces crucial technical developments with its long-awaited Pectra upgrade scheduled for May 7. This upgrade comes as Ethereum struggles against more efficient blockchain competitors, with DeFiLlama data showing Ethereum's total value locked (TVL) growing just 4% in April compared to Solana's 21% and BNB Chain's 9.9%. Over the past year, Ethereum has seen $3.3 billion in net outflows while competitors Base and Solana each captured $3.3 billion and $3.2 billion in net inflows respectively.

Despite these competitive challenges, Ethereum recorded $880 million in net inflows during April, suggesting a potential trend reversal ahead of the Pectra activation. However, Ethereum's position relative to Bitcoin continues weakening, with the ETH/BTC ratio dropping to approximately 0.19—its lowest level in five years.

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Until next time,

Damon James