Exocapitalism Part 4 - The protocol stack is where Lift may concentrate power

Follow the money in agentic commerce and you eventually arrive at the protocol layer.

The Lift argument in Poliks and Alonso Trillo’s Exocapitalism helps explain why. If agents, merchants, models and service providers can all execute, the valuable position increasingly sits above them, in the systems that establish authority, govern participation and settle transactions.

The acronym storm makes this look like a race between payment rails. It isn’t.

Google’s AP2 is a payment-agnostic framework for mandates, authorisation and auditability. Coinbase’s x402 and Stripe and Tempo’s MPP address machine-native payments. Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol helps merchants recognise legitimate, authorised agents, while Mastercard’s Agent Pay adds network capabilities for agentic transactions. OpenAI and Stripe’s ACP and Google’s UCP address the broader commerce flow around catalogues, carts and checkout.

These are overlapping layers, not competing versions of the same thing. An agentic purchase can touch identity, delegation, discovery, model access, orchestration, checkout and settlement, with influence potentially accumulating at each gateway.

That is where the strategic question gets interesting.

Stripe’s announced agreement to acquire OpenRouter, for example, would bring a payments company closer to the routing of token demand across hundreds of models and dozens of providers. Whether or not the transaction ultimately closes, the logic is revealing: payments plus model routing creates an increasingly powerful orchestration position.

Open standards may keep parts of this stack technically contestable, but technical openness does not necessarily produce competitive openness. Certification, distribution, identity, reputation and transaction data can still concentrate around a small number of institutions.

Which brings me back to Lift.

If production and execution become increasingly distributed, the power may migrate to whoever controls the layer through which everything has to pass.

For executives, the question is therefore not simply which protocol wins. It is who can refuse your participation, change your economics, see enough of your transactions to become indispensable, or ultimately decide which participants are trusted.

Lift may distribute execution while concentrating control at the point where transactions are recognised, authorised and settled.

That is where I would be looking.

#AgenticCommerce #Payments #AusBiz