Tokenization, Citrini, Personal Agent Protocol

Tokenization led the week, including a joint venture between OKX and ICE, the New York Stock Exchange’s parent. Simon sees these moves following the SEC’s innovation exemption, and calls a joint venture with a crypto-native partner a smart way for an incumbent to innovate. Dan notes that the Clarity Act didn’t pass, so the SEC and CFTC have issued guidance instead. A future administration could reverse it, but he argues that once mainstream consumers use tokenized products, they become hard to unwind. He reads ICE starting alongside the startups, not years behind them, as a bullish signal for tokenization.

Citrini Research’s new report argues that tokenization leads to a 24/7 internet economy, one that suits agents better than banking hours and manual KYC. Simon points to what it calls the Hyperliquid moment, a weekend when Hyperliquid priced oil more accurately than the closed traditional markets, which he says came up again and again in his conversations with large institutions. Dan agrees that a new fintech can start on stablecoin rails and add tokenized assets on the same stack. He didn’t buy Citrini’s basket, but finds the exercise useful: fintechs, some crypto, and the companies that own the agents and can route their transactions.

The Personal Agent Protocol, from Meta and Sierra with partners including Stripe, Shopify and Instinct, gives a consumer’s agent scoped access to a business after an OAuth sign-in. Simon notes that this isn’t KYC, just a handshake, but it gives agents a front door where today they rely on computer use. Dan says adoption by OpenAI or Anthropic would make it a de facto standard, as happened with MCP, and let businesses embrace bots instead of fighting them. He expects stablecoins to arrive as infrastructure: an agent platform that holds a consumer’s balance is more likely to sit in the transaction flow.

Both expect wallets to matter more. Simon sees the wallet becoming the credential store and the place to delegate authority to agents, with a card on the front of a stablecoin balance wherever stablecoins aren’t accepted. Dan expects agents to prefer wallets that speak protocols such as PAP and MPP, with cards as one funding source among several, so a new neobank anywhere can plug into global e-commerce. Simon has yet to see a neobank that is truly built for agents first.