We used to think of the internet as a place where humans clicked buttons to buy things. Now, it is becoming a place where software agents do the clicking for us, and the plumbing underneath is finally starting to look like it was built for the job.
For the past few years, the financial industry has been obsessed with the settlement layer. We watched as Visa settled $20B in stablecoins annually and eventually became a founding validator on Circle’s Arc L1. We saw SoFi launch the first bank-issued stablecoin on Mastercard, signaling that traditional finance was ready to move value at the speed of code. These were the heavy-duty pipes being laid in the dark.
Then came the distribution layer. This was the era of Circle and Binance, where the latter committed $100M in equity and a five-year deal to ensure that digital dollars could actually reach the people and platforms that needed them. It was about liquidity, access, and making sure the rails were not just functional, but ubiquitous.
This infrastructure now supports a $307B stablecoin supply, serving as the backbone for critical capital flows. As this market matures, we are witnessing a two-track race between tokenized deposits and payment stablecoins to capture institutional money.
But actually, the most interesting shift happened this week at Meta Connect 2026. With the expansion of the Muse ecosystem, we are seeing the emergence of the third layer: agent-commerce. This is where the Muse Spark model, a personal AI agent powered by a multimodal model, stops being a chatbot and starts being a consumer.
The announcements were a masterclass in integration. Meta confirmed that PayPal global Muse payments will allow customers to seamlessly shop and check out using their Muse personal AI agents across PayPal merchants worldwide. As PayPal noted, “We’re excited to partner with @Meta to enable PayPal customers to seamlessly shop and check out using their @Muse personal AI agents across PayPal merchants worldwide.”
Simultaneously, Shopify and Stripe have integrated their respective Shop Pay and Link wallets to enable agent-native commerce infrastructure. Muse can now search the Shopify catalog and execute checkout directly in-app, while Stripe is promoting the use of WebMCP to enable secure agent spending. These connectors, which also include Expedia and Instacart, are effectively turning the Muse agent into a digital wallet with a pulse.
The technical leap here is the Muse computer-use capability, which launched just days before the keynote. By running in a Muse Secure VM—an isolated Linux virtual machine in the cloud—the agent can interact with native macOS apps like Files, Mail, and Calendar, and drive a full browser. It is not just calling an API; it is navigating the web like a human would, but with the speed and precision of a machine.
Meta also unveiled the Luna camera-free smart glasses, featuring six microphones, open-ear speakers, and a dedicated AI button. While the hardware is impressive, the integration of Muse-on-glasses was only teased as coming “soon” and was not shipped at the keynote. Still, with 2.5M US downloads as of September 20, the user base is growing rapidly.
Of course, there is a notable edge case: Amazon has blocked Muse from its platform. It is a revealing exclusion. If you are a walled garden, the last thing you want is an autonomous agent bypassing your carefully curated user experience to find better prices or faster shipping elsewhere. It suggests that the future of commerce might be a battle between open agent-accessible platforms and those that try to lock the gates.
This pattern is becoming familiar: infrastructure is being built long before the regulation catches up. With the GENIUS Act enforcement cliff looming on January 18, 2027, the industry is clearly betting that it is better to have a functional, agent-driven economy in place than to wait for permission. They are building the rails, the distribution, and now the agents to drive on them.
What comes next is the inevitable friction between these autonomous agents and the legacy systems that still rely on human verification. We have the settlement layer, we have the distribution layer, and now we have the agents. The question is no longer whether the technology works, but how much of the economy we are willing to hand over to the software that lives in our browsers.