Ben Goertzel highlights the technical challenges facing blockchains in achieving scale, focusing on decentralization, scalability, and security. He emphasizes the importance of decentralized AI in competing with dominant corporations in the field.
Engineering Challenges and the Journey to Level 5 Commerce
In their annual letter in February 2026, the co-founders of Stripe, Patrick and John Collison, delve into the fusion of artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency, particularly in the realm of “agentic commerce”—enabling AI agents to autonomously discover, decide, and transact. While optimistic about the future role of crypto, the letter underscores critical areas where current blockchain infrastructure falls short for the demands of autonomous agents.
The Stripe founders liken the current state of crypto for AI to the mid-90s internet, viewing existing limitations not as roadblocks but as engineering challenges that must be resolved for the economy to advance to “Level 5,” or fully autonomous, agentic commerce.
Stripe is heavily investing in this transition, recently acquiring the stablecoin platform Bridge and launching the Agentic Commerce Suite to assist businesses in adapting to this shift as blockchain technology evolves.
In their report, the founders pinpoint two primary technical bottlenecks hindering blockchains from serving as the main infrastructure for agentic commerce: cost predictability and transaction throughput. Stripe asserts that blockchains need to support 1 million to 1 billion transactions per second (TPS) to progress.
Ben Goertzel, CEO of the ASI Alliance and SingularityNET, finds this projection “entirely plausible.” He notes that standard digital financial transactions during peak hours already reach millions, even when predominantly driven by humans through intermediaries.
The shift to agentic commerce alters the scale significantly. “Instead of a single person initiating an action, we have an entire team of agents operating autonomously,” Goertzel elaborated. “Rather than one entity, we get an entire squad generating transactions.”
Addressing the Blockchain Trilemma
According to Goertzel, achieving the scale envisioned by Stripe requires overcoming fundamental hurdles beyond sheer speed. These include balancing decentralization, scalability, and security, along with enabling agents to operate across multiple networks. Managing the vast data generated by autonomous squads and facilitating direct peer-to-peer settlements and “elevated decentralized identity” are among the other capabilities blockchain must acquire.
Goertzel proposes that the solution lies in a system of specialized networks rather than a single, monolithic network, akin to a modern highway with designated lanes for various types of traffic. “By segregating traffic, we prevent congestion,” Goertzel observed. “This is precisely the scalable architecture needed for agentic commerce: a network of shards, each excelling in its designated function and seamlessly interacting with the whole.”
The intensifying race for AI supremacy is consolidating power on a massive scale. In contrast to the decentralized nature of blockchain, the AI sector is evolving into an oligarchy dominated by tech giants investing billions in proprietary infrastructure. This concentration of influence has raised concerns about whether corporate control will override the common good.
Nonetheless, a resilient ecosystem of startups is mounting a strategic counter-attack. Leveraging agility, specialized expertise, and open-source collaboration, these smaller entities are betting on architectural diversity and ethical transparency to disrupt the prevailing monolithic paradigm.
“While we may not match the size of Google or Microsoft, we are approaching a scale that enables us to compete more effectively, inching closer to the threshold needed to establish decentralized AI as the predominant form of AI globally. Our ‘secret sauce’ lies in the power of diversity. Being decentralized allows us to bring together individuals, communities, AI algorithms, and datasets from across the world, in contrast to the centralized approaches adopted by large entities,” Goertzel remarked.
He added that this strategic diversity holds particular significance in the current industry landscape, where numerous leading researchers are recognizing that simply scaling up large language models (LLMs) will not lead to AGI. “This realization guided our Hyperon approach to AGI and superintelligence from the outset,” Goertzel emphasized.
To underscore their commitment to the “cosmopolitan approach,” SingularityNET, in collaboration with AGI Society, is hosting this year’s AGI-26 conference to explore diverse perspectives and methodologies on general intelligence.
Moreover, Goertzel shared insights with Bitcoin.com News on mitigating the risk of AI control by a few entities or governments. He stated:
“We require open, decentralized, and democratic methodologies across the entire AI pipeline: deploying and operating AI systems at scale, ensuring fair data supply, instilling broad human values in AI systems, and collectively deciding on their development.”
Goertzel believes that combining open-source code with decentralized infrastructure and governance ensures transparency, widespread accessibility, and significant benefits for humanity and other sentient beings through AI.
FAQ ❓
- What is agentic commerce? Agentic commerce refers to the capability 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 requirement for transaction throughput of 1 million to 1 billion transactions per second (TPS).
- How is Stripe preparing for the future of agentic commerce? Stripe has acquired the stablecoin platform Bridge and introduced the Agentic Commerce Suite to assist businesses in adapting to this transformation.
- What is the significance of the AGI-26 conference? The AGI-26 conference aims to explore diverse approaches to artificial general intelligence (AGI), advocating decentralized methodologies that benefit humanity.