Building The Future Of Money With Agentic Commerce

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Podcast
Our interview with Craig DeWitt
3 AI Jobs You Can’t Miss
What's trending in AI this week
Community Update
How Homebase Helps You

🎙️ This Week’s Interview

AI Founder Story

Craig DeWitt: Reimagining Agentic Commerce

Craig DeWitt spent eight years building payment rails before founding Skyfire, a platform that gives AI agents identity tokens and the ability to pay so they can access websites, APIs, and services without human babysitting.

Solving the Invisible Blockers

Agents aren’t first-class citizens of the web: hit a site or API and you’re blocked by bot-protection; get told to “visit the website, create an account, swipe a card, paste an API key”—which breaks any agentic workflow. Skyfire’s play is to let agents present a verified identity and pay, so services can treat them like real users.

The Origin Spark

Legal pressure on LLMs (think NYT v. OpenAI) made one thing obvious: agents will have to pay for what they access. The idea started with “pay for content,” then widened to APIs and services like an agent booking Yelp on your behalf which today requires human sign-ups.

Skyfire’s Milestone Engine

The Problem Today →
Agents get blocked by bot-blockers and access flows that assume humans, not machines; marketplaces and content sites can’t safely let agents in or charge them.
The Breakthrough →
Skyfire gives each agent a KYA (“Know Your Agent”) identity and a payment token it can pass to services via standard JWTs; the service can auto-create a user and return auth—no human in the loop.
The Proof Story →
After launch, developer inbound spiked; that demand let Skyfire sign marketplaces and content providers as sellers and link up with bot-protection partners so sites can both allow and monetize agent traffic.
The Big Example →
Appify (a Skyfire launch partner) lets agents authenticate, see tools/agents, and pay on the fly; the same identity/payment pattern applies to lead-gen agents that need LinkedIn-adjacent data or paid industry signals.

Why It Matters (vision line)

The world’s next customer surge won’t be human clicks—it’ll be agents transacting directly. Skyfire is building the rails so agents can identify themselves, pass policy checks, and pay, even at fractions of a cent creating a real machine economy.

The Agentic Commerce Stack

Stablecoins now, cards later: Credit-card tokenization for agents is coming from the networks, but not public yet; today Skyfire uses USDC wallets and credit-card-like token flows.
Micro-payments: Agents can purchase single requests or pages at fraction-of-a-cent granularity, something cards can’t do.
Open protocols: The world won’t run on a single vendor; open identity/payment protocols enable ubiquity and scale.

Guardrails: Policy & Approvals

Developers set spend policies; Skyfire blocks out-of-spec tokens, and can prompt the human for just-in-time decisioning (e.g., “approve this $300 purchase?”) to keep fraud and compliance tight.