Zerion Live Recap: Pay the Agents

A year ago, "pay the agents" was a thought experiment. Today, it hardly surprises us that agents are receiving and sending millions of dollars worth of crypto.

For the second episode of Zerion Live, Abi and Jules brought together the teams sitting at the center of that shift: Tony Plasencia and Halsey Huth from MoonPay, Rishin from the Solana Foundation, and Suheil Sakhar from Polymarket. The discussion was about what it takes to put money in an agent's hands, and what changes once you do.

https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1pKdRbEVNbyJW

Where we actually are: agent-assisted, not autonomous

The first question on the table: are agents really moving real volume? Suheil from Polymarket gave the most useful framing.

"If you mean fully agentic, with no humans at all opening and closing positions, that's happening, but we're still early. There's a small slice of volume today. If you zoom out to agent-assisted, where humans use LLMs and agents to scan markets, generate ideas, and execute through a CLI or SDK, there's a ton of activity. And it's growing weekly."

That assisted layer is where the volume lives in 2026. Polymarket's CLI, launched in February, became the default way for developers and agents to touch the protocol from a terminal. Zerion just shipped its CLI. MoonPay's CLI has been live for months and is now expanding into a desktop product.

Tony at MoonPay broke down where users actually point their agents: on-ramping, research, prediction markets, and token trades. The patterns are consistent enough that MoonPay is building structured recipes and automations on top of them. It’s a layer where you describe a workflow in natural language, and the agent runs it on a schedule.

The Open Wallet Standard unlock

The biggest change isn't that agents can trade. It's how much more comfortable people are with that.

Halsey from MoonPay was direct about what changed:

"We launched the CLI before OWS was live. When we added the Open Wallet Standard back in, it was night and day. How much money people were looking to move through their agents. Once you give people infrastructure they can trust, you actually start to see real usage."

That trust shift cascaded into behavior. Whales who would have moved size through MoonPay's retail products started trading on Polymarket through their agent setup instead. The guardrails and policy layer baked into OWS (spending limits, allow-lists, signing rules, etc) turned out to be what people needed before they would write a real check.

Tony, who's further out on the curve than most, deploys around fifty dollars a day to his agent for trading. His line drew nods across the panel:

"I'm willing to give my agent money I'm okay with losing."

Right now, that's the cultural threshold. Trust is local, behavior is incremental, and standards like OWS exist so the next user can catch up.

The kitchen, the apartment, the merch store

Trading dominates the headlines, but the more telling use cases are the small ones.

Rishin from the Solana Foundation shared what his team has been building for fun:

"We set up a Raspberry Pi with pay.sh and a microphone in the Solana office. If you go to the kitchen, it has a weekly allowance of about a hundred USDC, and you can say, 'Can you buy cold brew from Amazon?' That's how we're restocking the kitchen now."

Halsey runs a cron job that hits search APIs and aggregates data sources for his New York apartment hunt. For a few cents per run, his agent surfaces listings that don't show up on Zillow or StreetEasy. Tony pointed to people buying Pudgy Penguins merch through MoonPay Commerce on Shopify, paying in stablecoins on Solana Pay.

The thread connecting them is that crypto rails happen to be the easiest way for an agent to settle. Rishin put it cleanly:

"Most people actually don't care about trading. They just want very simple ways to use products. Being able to pay for something natively from a terminal — or from Claude, or from ChatGPT — that's really good. The value is clear even if you literally don't care about crypto. Which I think should be the goal."

Money Legos became agent Legos

The roundtable kept circling back on composability. Zerion's CLI handles portfolio data and execution. MoonPay handles on-ramps and agent cards. Polymarket exposes its full stack through public endpoints. Solana underwrites the settlement layer and pay.sh handles micropayments. 

What you can already do today: an LLM-driven research agent identifies a thematic trade, an on-ramp tops up the wallet, the Polymarket CLI places the bet, and Zerion API tracks the position. Five teams, one workflow, no human in the loop after the prompt.

Halsey called out the meta-effect:

"If you go into the Zerion app today, you'd actually end up taking advantage of products that were tinkered on by everyone on this call. Each week, everyone keeps tacking on something new that unlocks a further feature set."

As Abi put it, the old "money Legos" phrase from DeFi summer applies again and becomes “agent Legos”: every product now ships an MCP or CLI surface, and every other agentic product picks it up as a skill.

The legacy software wave is coming

A quieter point from Tony deserved its own headline:

"There's a good chunk of companies that haven't figured out what the agent version of their product is. Notion launched their CLI a day or two ago and people were surprised. We shouldn't be surprised. For many of these companies, this is the first time they're looking at crypto in a while — not because of stablecoins or the crypto ecosystem, but because it's a way to accurately monetize their existing product for this new agent user base. And it just so happens the best way to do that is on crypto rails."

The implication is large. The next wave of stablecoin adoption may not come from crypto-native builders at all. It will come from legacy software companies discovering that their agent-facing API needs to take payments per call, and crypto is the only rail that can settle in milliseconds for fractions of a cent.

Key takeaways

• Agent-assisted volume is real today. fully autonomous trading is still early but accelerating.
• Trust standards drive behavior. OWS unlocked materially more capital flowing through MoonPay agents.
• The novel use cases aren't trading. They're kitchen restocks, apartment hunts, merch, micropayments for inference.
• Composability is back. Money Legos are now agent Legos; every product ships a CLI or MCP surface.
• Standards are contested. More standards may grow the pie, but shipping useful products matters more.
• Legacy software is next. Notion-style CLIs from non-crypto companies will drive the next stablecoin wave.
• CLIs are transitional. Generative UI, iMessage agents like Poke, and voice are where consumer interfaces are heading.
• Trust is the lock. Agents win when users trust them more than they trust themselves.

The fastest way to understand the shift is to put a few dollars in an agent's hands and see what it does. Try the Zerion CLI with partner skills from Moonpay, Polymarket, Solana, and others. 

The next episode of Zerion Live is coming in June. Follow Zerion on X so you don't miss it.