Ben Goertzel points out that blockchain will need to overcome technical hurdles around decentralization, scalability, and security to achieve the necessary scale. He also emphasizes the need for decentralized AI to compete with the large companies that dominate the space.
Engineering Challenges and the Path to Level 5 Commerce
In their February 2026 annual letter, Patrick and John Collison, co-founders of financial services platform Stripe, addressed the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency, particularly “agent commerce,” or the ability of AI agents to independently discover, decide, and transact. While optimistic about the long-term role of cryptocurrencies, the report highlights key areas where current blockchain infrastructure is “not ready” for the demands of autonomous agents.
Stripe founders characterize the current state of AI cryptocurrencies as similar to the internet in the mid-90s. They see current limitations not as “barriers to trade” but as “engineering challenges” that need to be resolved before the economy moves to “Level 5,” or fully autonomous agent commerce.
Stripe is betting big on this transition, recently acquiring stablecoin platform Bridge and launching its Agentic Commerce Suite. These moves are designed to help businesses prepare for this change while the underlying blockchain technology matures.
In the report, the founders identified two major technical bottlenecks that currently prevent blockchain from serving as the primary rail for agent commerce: cost predictability and transaction throughput. From Stripe’s perspective, for blockchain to progress, it needs to support 1 million to 1 billion transactions per second (TPS).
Ben Goertzel, CEO of the Artificial SuperIntelligence (ASI) Alliance and CEO of SingularityNET, finds this prediction “totally plausible.” Goertzel points out that at peak times, standard digital financial transactions already number in the millions, even though they are primarily generated through human intermediaries.
The move to agent commerce changes the scale by orders of magnitude. “Instead of one person initiating an action, a whole team of agents works autonomously,” Goertzel explained. “Instead of one entity, the entire squad generates transactions.”
Overcoming the blockchain trilemma
According to Goertzel, to achieve the scale Stripe envisions, it will need to overcome some fundamental hurdles beyond actual speed. This includes balancing decentralization, scalability, security, and not restricting agents to a single network. Managing the vast amounts of information generated by autonomous forces and enabling direct peer-to-peer payments and “highly decentralized identities” are among the most important functions that blockchain must accomplish.
Goertzel suggests that the solution is not a single monolithic network, but a system of specialized networks, similar to modern highways, with buses, rapid transit, and dedicated freight lanes. “By separating traffic, we can avoid congestion,” Goertzel said. “This is exactly the scalable architecture you need for agent commerce: a network of shards, each part doing one thing well and interacting seamlessly with the rest.”
The high-stakes race for AI supremacy is causing a massive consolidation of power. Unlike the decentralized nature of blockchain, the AI sector is becoming an oligarchy dominated by tech giants investing billions of dollars in their own infrastructure. This concentration of influence has prompted scrutiny over whether corporate gatekeeping can supersede public interest.
Nevertheless, the resilient ecosystem of startups is launching a tactical counterattack. By leveraging agility, niche specialization, and open source collaboration, these small companies are betting that architectural diversity and ethical transparency will disrupt the monolithic status quo.
“Although we are not at the scale of Google or Microsoft, we are reaching a scale where we can compete more effectively, and we are approaching the level needed to make decentralized AI the dominant form of AI on the planet. One of our ‘secret sauces’ is the power of diversity. Being decentralized allows us to connect people, communities, and AI around the world, as opposed to the monolithic approach taken by large, centralized organizations. You can connect algorithms, data sets,” Goertzel said. he said.
He added that this strategic diversity is particularly powerful in the current industry climate, where many leading researchers are realizing that simply building a large LLM will not lead to AGI. “This is something we have understood from the beginning and has guided our Hyperon approach to AGI and superintelligence,” added Goertzel.
Demonstrating its belief in an “international approach,” Goertzel’s SingularityNET collaborated with the AGI Society to organize this year’s AGI-26 conference, which explores different ways of interpreting and approaching general intelligence.
Meanwhile, Goertzel shared his thoughts with Bitcoin.com News on how stakeholders can minimize the risk of AI being controlled by a few organizations or governments. he said:
“We need open, decentralized, and democratic methodologies across the AI pipeline: deploying and running AI systems at scale, ensuring data is equitably fed, teaching AI systems a range of human values, and making collective decisions about their development.”
According to Goertzel, the combination of open source code and decentralized infrastructure and governance will ensure that AI is transparent, widely accessible, and “highly beneficial to humanity and other sentient beings.”
Frequently asked questions ❓
- What is agent commerce? Agent commerce refers to the ability of AI agents to independently discover, decide, and transact without human intervention.
- What challenges does current blockchain technology face for AI transactions? Key challenges include cost predictability and the need for transaction throughput of 1 million to 1 billion transactions per second (TPS).
- How is Stripe preparing for the future of agent commerce? Stripe acquired stablecoin platform Bridge and launched Agentic Commerce Suite to help businesses adapt to this transformation.
- What is the significance of the AGI-26 meeting? The AGI-26 conference aims to explore diverse approaches to artificial general intelligence (AGI) and promote decentralized methods that benefit humanity.
