Welcome to #96 of the AI edge.
BTC pushed to 79.5k this week but couldn't quite crack 80k. Still hovering above 75k though, so the structure looks healthy. Break past 80k and things get interesting. Until then, we wait.
Model season came early this week. OpenAI dropped GPT-5.5 and it's sitting at the top of multiple benchmarks, beating both Claude and Gemini.
DeepSeek also shipped V4, its first major release since the R1 launch that shook up the industry last year. Early results say it hangs with most frontier models but nothing jumps off the page yet. Give it a few weeks.
Anthropic didn't ship a model but arguably made the louder move. Amazon committed another $25B in investment, with $5B available immediately. Sounds like a monster check until you look closer.
Anthropic is pledging to spend over $100B back on AWS over the next decade. That's looks more like a vendor financing loop than a straight investment. Amazon funds Anthropic, Anthropic buys Amazon's compute.
We broke down what this really means for Trainium, compute lock-in, and why this is as much a chip bet as it is an AI model bet last week in Tessara Research (our AI infra research newsletter).
We are also releasing our primers on Memory, Compute, and the State of AI Infrastructure shortly.
These are the reports we wish existed when tracking AI infrastructure properly: where the bottlenecks are, which constraints matter, how they flow through GPUs, memory, power, networking, and capex, and what investors should actually watch.
They will be published through Tessara Research only, with the best material going behind the subscriber wall.
Subscribe here to get access before we lock them (1 click, free)
The Big Story: The App Store for Agents Just Opened
Coinbase shipped Agentic.Market this week, a marketplace where AI agents can find, evaluate, and purchase services autonomously. Can you picture an app store where the shoppers aren't people? Right. They're bots with wallets.
The x402 protocol has been building momentum. The ecosystem has processed over 165 million transactions totaling around $50M in volume, with close to 100k services and over 480k agents actively participating.
But service discovery has been a mess. Builders were piecing things together through scattered channels and word of mouth. Agentic.Market consolidates all of it into a single interface with semantic search, real-time usage metrics, and rich service profiles. Zero accounts. Zero API keys. Zero sign-up friction. Walk in and buy.
The deeper move is what's running underneath the frontend. A machine-readable discovery layer lets agents tap into an MCP server, scan available services, and wire up new capabilities on the fly with no human involvement.
One builder ran a test, pointed their agent at a neural search service listed on the marketplace, spent a penny, and pulled back a full research brief sourced from major outlets in under two minutes. The traditional web was architected to block automated access. This is plumbing built to welcome it.
Agentic.market homepage
The Wedge
Over 105k agents made purchases in the past month, all settling in USDC with none of the usual friction. No credit cards, no login walls, no human middlemen. That's a live economy operating at scale.
Services get indexed automatically once their first transaction clears. Providers don't need to apply or wait for approval. Build something, get paid once, and you're listed. Distribution becomes a byproduct of activity.
x402 is fully open source and not gated behind Coinbase. Anyone can build on it. That's a deliberate move to own the protocol layer for agentic commerce rather than just a single product.
The Fine Print
165M transactions is a big number but $50M spread across that volume puts the average transaction value well below a dollar. The economy is buzzing but the ticket sizes are still tiny.
A marketplace is only as useful as its inventory. If premium services stay locked behind traditional enterprise sales cycles and gated APIs, agents end up shopping from a thin catalog.
The human internet runs on search engines and app stores. The agent internet just got its first real storefront. Whether agents end up browsing Agentic.Market the way we browse the App Store is the billion-dollar question Coinbase is betting on.
Nous Research released Hermes Agent v0.11.0, its largest update yet (700+ PRs), adding TUI v2, unlimited subagent recursion, new LLM/image providers, and expanded gateway integrations.
NATIX Network partnered with Valeo to supply training data for its multi-camera World Foundation Model, strengthening 360° scene understanding for autonomous systems.
AdTAO (Bittensor SN21) launched on Bitstarter, bringing 13 years of Google Ads expertise onchain to deliver Bittensor-native advertising intelligence.
Minos (Bittensor SN107) removed the major setup bottleneck for genomics mining, shifting the focus from onboarding friction to pure performance optimization.
Fetch.ai enabled direct agent-to-agent integrations with Shopify storefronts, allowing AI agents to transact with e-commerce sites without scraping.
B1M AI demonstrated a major throughput gain, cutting 5GB data processing time to 46 seconds, boosting performance across its Bittensor subnet.
RESI (SN46) launched a live real estate valuation portal, delivering instant property appraisals powered by its on-chain models.
Nous Research expanded Hermes Agent’s image model support, adding integrations for ChatGPT Image, Nano Banana, z-Image, and FLUX.
🔥 Our Weekly Top Tweets
#1 OpenClaw Cools Off, Hermes Catches Fire
OpenClaw search interest is down ~80% from its peak, but the repo is still quietly adding +1k GitHub stars per week. Meanwhile, Hermes just hit all-time high search interest and pulled in +35k stars this week alone. Feels like user migration and they’re sticking.
#2 The Missing Infrastructure for AI Agents
In a new piece, a16z argues that AI agents are evolving into real economic actors but the infrastructure around identity, payments, governance, verification, and user control hasn’t kept pace.
They outline how blockchains can fill the gap: portable agent identity (KYA), programmable stablecoin rails, onchain governance guarantees, verifiable execution logs, and scoped delegation frameworks, positioning crypto as the coordination layer for an agent-native internet
Cheers,
Teng Yan & 0xAce
P.S. If you’re a startup doing serious work in AI or robotics and want to work closely with us, reply to this email and let’s chat.
