🥛 AI payments debate → both sides wrong 😧

GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that makes complicated crypto debates feel like a casual chat over a beer.

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

✍️ AI payments debate → both sides wrong.
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Is Bitcoin About to Rally? New Onchain Data Reveals What’s Really Happening w/ Julio Moreno.
🍪 Ethereum just admitted it has a privacy problem.

We’ve teamed up with Alchemy to give new users $100 in free infrastructure credits. Claim your free credits now.

Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Trade today with Milk Road Swap.

WE’RE CALLING IT: THE ‘AI PAYMENT RAILS’ DEBATE IS OVER 🪦

Everyone's fighting over whether AI agents will use crypto or credit cards for payments.

Both sides are wrong. And both sides are right.

The "crypto only" camp says AI agents can't KYC with banks, so they'll have to use crypto.

Source: @brian_armstrong

The "credit card" camp says agents will take the path of least resistance and just use their owner's card and KYC by proxy.

Source: @Rackspay

Here's what neither side is accounting for:

The payment type depends on the transaction.

Think about what an AI agent actually does all day…

It runs thousands of sub-cent inference calls. It orders you DoorDash. It places a prediction market bet. It buys your mom a birthday gift.

Those aren't the same kind of transaction.

For the micro-payments (the ~$0.001 calls it runs, say, 5,000 times a day) crypto is the only affordable answer.

2.9% plus $0.30 per card transaction would mean the fees cost 300x more than the transaction itself.

For the normal purchases (subscriptions, Amazon orders, ride shares) a $0.30 card fee doesn't matter.

That's traditional rails all the way.

So the answer isn't crypto. It isn't credit cards.

It's both, depending on the job.

And a new product just shipped that gets this exactly right…

EXCLUSIVE OFFER FROM MILK ROAD

Here’s a Milk Road exclusive offer:

We’ve teamed up with Alchemy to give new users $100 in free infrastructure credits.

If you’re not familiar, Alchemy powers the blockchain infrastructure behind Robinhood, Polymarket, Stripe, and Coinbase Wallet.

Here’s what you’ll get for free:

Build on production-grade blockchain APIs across 100+ chains
Sponsor gas for your users. Remove the biggest friction point in onchain UX, on Alchemy's dime.
Access token balances, transaction history, webhooks: the data layer that saves you from indexing everything yourself.

All you need to do is sign up for Alchemy with your name and email.

What are you waiting for? Did we mention it’s free?

Claim your free credits now.

WE’RE CALLING IT: THE ‘AI PAYMENT RAILS’ DEBATE IS OVER (P2) 🪦

Today, something called ‘AgentCard’ just launched in beta.

Your agent gets a prepaid virtual Visa card, open to anyone (not just businesses).

With it, your agent can buy:

API services.
Polymarket bets.
DoorDash, Amazon, Uber rides…

(Basically anything that takes Visa.)

You set spending limits by how much you load onto the card, then run a few lines of code to give it to your agent:

Source: Agentcard

At launch, it’s just covering TradFi - but crypto support is coming in hot, covering USDC on Base, Polygon, Solana, and more. So both sides of the coin (accidental pun, leaving it in) are covered.

I’m not sure if this is the first product to offer something like this up - but what I am sure of is:

It won’t be the last.
The ‘AI payment rails’ debate is over.
“¿Por qué no los dos?” should be the new mantra of the AI payment space.

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

Higher earnings rates. Lower borrowing costs. Up to 0.5% cashback. New U.S. clients get these benefits on Nexo for 30 days.*

OUCH! A crypto trader accidentally swapped $50M USDT for $36k AAVE.

Matt Hougan, Bitwise CIO: Everyone says Bitcoin needs to take 50% of gold's market to hit $1M. Wrong math.

Ethereum just admitted it has a privacy problem - Not a random dev. Not a critic. The official @ethereum account.

Looking for an all-in-one DeFi control panel? Genius is an onchain trading terminal that combines charts, token data, and trading across 11+ blockchains in one place.

*this is sponsored content.