Acting editor-in-chief
Gary McFarlane
Acting editor-in-chief
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Everyone is talking about the Citrini Research report that sent the market into a tailspin yesterday. Buried in its 7,000 words of wisdom is a huge buy signal for Solana and Ethereum Layer 2s.
The report, entitled The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis, is a work of fiction that explores a future scenario in which AI disruption leads to what it describes as a “negative feedback loop with no natural brake”.
In short, AI is going to displace white collar workers at an unprecedented rate. It should have been obvious, but we waited until 2028 for the penny to drop…
“It should have been clear all along that a single GPU cluster in North Dakota generating the output previously attributed to 10,000 white-collar workers in midtown Manhattan is more economic pandemic than economic panacea. The velocity of money flatlined. The human-centric consumer economy, 70% of GDP at the time, withered. We probably could have figured this out sooner if we just asked how much money machines spend on discretionary goods. (Hint: it’s zero.)
“AI capabilities improved, companies needed fewer workers, white collar layoffs increased, displaced workers spent less, margin pressure pushed firms to invest more in AI, AI capabilities improved…”
Here’s what that looks like schematically:
Entering an age of abundant intelligence
There is no self-correction as we would expect to see in a typical cyclical recession.
It goes something like this: construction (or other economic activity) slows, rates adjust downwards, allowing businesses to return to expanding output, until overproduction kicks in again, and so on.
In the AI doom loop, AI improves, fewer workers are needed, fewer workers mean less spending, the economy weakens, companies invest in more AI to protect margins, AI gets even better, and the cycle repeats – there is no natural break.
We thought it was a sectoral story. I’m not in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), so there’s no need to worry. But it is more than software. Much more. It was a comforting notion that AI would usher in an era of creative destruction, as seen in past technological assaults on the old ways of doing things.
Yes, AI will destroy jobs, but, as in the past, new jobs and hitherto unimagined industries would emerge to replace them.
Trouble is, according to Citrini’s scenario, AI is a story of human intelligence displacement. The entire white collar workforce is imperilled. It is the consequence of abundant intelligence.
The authors of the Cetrini report remind us that advanced economies like the US are service-based. The report breaks that down so everyone can understand:
“The US economy is a white-collar services economy. White-collar workers represented 50% of employment and drove roughly 75% of discretionary consumer spending. The businesses and jobs that AI was chewing up were not tangential to the US economy, they were the US economy.”
Unfortunately for all of us – white collar, blue collar, whatever – machines don’t buy stuff.
AI agents destroy intermediation – bye bye credit cards, hello stablecoins
The report makes a robust case for how consumer agents will end the age of intermediation.
AI agents operate autonomously on behalf of their human owners, which means they can find the best flight or hotel on the market with ease because they never get tired, don’t find anything monotonous or dull, and never sleep.
The days of companies relying on our laziness or inertia are numbered. Add ‘vibe coding’ to the mix, and a new wave of startups can spin up delivery services apps in a few weeks to compete with DoorDash et al, or automate workflow in a bespoke way that fits your corporate needs more performantly than say Monday. Everywhere, fees are being compressed to near zero.
And then we come to our friends, the banks. Why pay fees to Mastercard and Amex when you can use a stablecoin running on a low-fee blockchain like Solana, or an Ethereum Layer 2 like Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, or Polygon?
“Once agents controlled the transaction, they went looking for bigger paperclips.
“There was only so much price-matching and aggregating to do. The biggest way to repeatedly save the user money (especially when agents started transacting among themselves) was to eliminate fees. In machine-to-machine commerce, the 2-3% card interchange rate became an obvious target.
“Agents went looking for faster and cheaper options than cards. Most settled on using stablecoins via Solana or Ethereum L2s, where settlement was near-instant and the transaction cost was measured in fractions of a penny.”
And what agentic AI will do for stablecoins could also be applied to cross-border payment protocols like Ripple’s XRP Ledger, although it doesn’t get a mention in this report.
Coinbase has already begun experimenting with a protocol that allows AI agents to make payments on-chain.
The tokenization, disintermediation, agentic AI narrative to beat the bear market blues
Crypto has been looking for a “new” narrative to lift the fog of the bear market. Well, it’s been hiding in plain sight: tokenization, disintermediation, and Agentic AI.
Will that solve the problem of an economy without enough workers getting paid wages and salaries to drive the consumption that companies depend on?
Probably not, but as the report contends, we’ve got time to figure out a solution for that. Taxing the hyperscaler ‘robber barons’ is suggested, but that’s unlikely to go down well with the Lords of the data centers.
In payments, as elsewhere, disruption is coming and everyone – investors, companies, and consumers – needs to start thinking about what it all means.
Consumer behavior is already shifting. Chargebacks911, a global leader in dispute resolution and chargeback prevention, is warning merchants and payments firms that agentic commerce will reshape disputes, as AI systems move from recommending purchases to executing them. Chargebacks are payment reversals initiated by a cardholder’s bank.
For years, most chargebacks fell into three categories: fraud, merchant error, or buyer’s remorse. Agent-initiated transactions create a fourth scenario. The purchase is technically authorised, but the result does not match the customer’s expectations.
“The payments industry has always treated the click as the signal of intent,” says Monica Eaton, founder and CEO of Chargebacks911.
“Agentic commerce removes the click. So now we need a new way to prove intent when a human was not directly involved.”
Keep an eye on your bank account, and welcome to the future.
Report co-author Alap Shah, explains more about the ideas in the report, such as AI-induced ‘ghost GDP’, where value accrues on the balance sheets of the hyperscalers but does not show up in the “human-centric consumer economy”:
