a16z recently dropped an article outlining the 5 foundational infrastructures missing from AI agents: identity, governance, payments, verification, and user control. Each of these could easily support a company on its own. When you stack them together, they actually share a common root. Right now, agents lack a neutral coordination layer. They can perform tasks and settle transactions, but identity isn't portable, permissions aren't transferable, audit logs are stuck on the platforms that host them, and payment links typically have a person lurking behind the checkout.
This is a structural issue; the internet has tackled similar problems before. Before TCP/IP, networks operated independently. Before SSL, businesses couldn't verify each other's identities. Each leap in digital infrastructure ultimately converges on a neutral layer not owned by any single vendor. The agentic economy is currently in this 'pre-convergence' phase, and the stakes are higher. Agents have already begun to represent humans in hiring, payments, and taking on responsibilities.
Today's solutions are piecemeal. The vertically integrated fiat stack locks identity into a compliance map controlled by a single issuer; MCP-like extensions bridge application-layer identity but leave settling semantics hanging; closed agent frameworks promise scoped delegation, yet the audit logs end up on the vendor's servers. Each approach addresses one layer correctly but quietly shifts the costs of the other four onto developers, merchants, and users.
There's another deeper reason why this is particularly critical today. Intelligence is collapsing towards near-zero marginal costs, and the real bottleneck has shifted to verification. When you can spin up a million seemingly professional agents at once, 'sounding professional' no longer carries information. What becomes truly expensive is proving what an agent is, what it's permitted to do, what it actually did, and who is on the hook if it messes up. Verification is the new compute power.
Therefore, the coordination layer must remain neutral, and all guarantees must be enforceable at a cryptographic level. Identity, payments, permissions, and credentials need to flow together as a portable base layer alongside the agent on each platform it reaches.
This is precisely the layer that Kite AI is building. 🪁
Original article link: https://x.com/a16zcrypto/status/2046243550715945367
This is a structural issue; the internet has tackled similar problems before. Before TCP/IP, networks operated independently. Before SSL, businesses couldn't verify each other's identities. Each leap in digital infrastructure ultimately converges on a neutral layer not owned by any single vendor. The agentic economy is currently in this 'pre-convergence' phase, and the stakes are higher. Agents have already begun to represent humans in hiring, payments, and taking on responsibilities.
Today's solutions are piecemeal. The vertically integrated fiat stack locks identity into a compliance map controlled by a single issuer; MCP-like extensions bridge application-layer identity but leave settling semantics hanging; closed agent frameworks promise scoped delegation, yet the audit logs end up on the vendor's servers. Each approach addresses one layer correctly but quietly shifts the costs of the other four onto developers, merchants, and users.
There's another deeper reason why this is particularly critical today. Intelligence is collapsing towards near-zero marginal costs, and the real bottleneck has shifted to verification. When you can spin up a million seemingly professional agents at once, 'sounding professional' no longer carries information. What becomes truly expensive is proving what an agent is, what it's permitted to do, what it actually did, and who is on the hook if it messes up. Verification is the new compute power.
Therefore, the coordination layer must remain neutral, and all guarantees must be enforceable at a cryptographic level. Identity, payments, permissions, and credentials need to flow together as a portable base layer alongside the agent on each platform it reaches.
This is precisely the layer that Kite AI is building. 🪁
Original article link: https://x.com/a16zcrypto/status/2046243550715945367