Singaporeans used to diss China EV cars the way Elon did — then everyone started driving one. China's robotics will follow the same path. Luckily for China, robots don't need 2nm chips — they need software, sensors and actuators, which China already does well. Give it 3 years before a Unitree fries my char kway teow. And East Asian consumers may embrace robots far more readily than the West — less doom and gloom. Reminds me of The Creator: the world split in two. The West fighting thinking machines, the East welcoming them into the community.

Kicking off the week with this repost about the future of agentic commerce 🌐 @stripe laid out 5 levels of agentic commerce in their annual letter, borrowed from how we talk about self-driving cars. Each level is defined by what you stop doing, not what the AI starts doing. 1/ You choose the items, the agent handles checkout. Filling forms, not making decisions. 2/ You describe what you need, the agent researches and brings back options. You still make the call. 3/ You delegate a task ("coffee beans under $10") and the agent finds it and buys it, already knowing your preferences. 4/ The agent runs the recurring stuff: restocking, subscriptions, inside the rules you set. 5/ Last one: No prompt at all. The agent anticipates what you need and buys it. By Stripe's own read, most of us are still at Level 1 and 2. The jump that matters comes higher up: an agent that arrives with intent and payment authority before a brand ever runs its funnel. 🎥 @luizabr1402, BD @ Pundi AI.

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Important reminder to the @PundiAI community. The deadline to bridge out assets from the Pundi AIFX Omnilayer is approaching: 30 May 2026, 23:59 SGT. After this date, bridge-out functionality will no longer be available. We strongly encourage all holders to complete their bridge-out before the deadline to maintain access to their assets. Really appreciate your support and recognition. Link: forum.pundi.ai/t/discussion-…

All thanks to TSMC. Pumping the Taiwan stock market, solving unemployment, making Taiwanese have more sex, saving the island's future — 護國神山 in every sense. Graduates in Taiwan aren't debating whether to join TSMC, Acer, Asus or MediaTek anymore. They're debating whether to join TSMC Fab 1, Fab 20 or Fab 25. (Fab 20 is the most prestigious) TSMC hires ~8,000 people a year, and Taiwan had only 107k babies in 2025 — a record low. That's one TSMC badge for every 13 newborn. Gone are the 2010s when Taiwan wages stagnated for 20 years. Now everything is on the rise. And on that note about more sex — TSMC should just run a hiring slogan: "Real men have fabs and sex." 神山maxxing.

Microsoft just banned its own engineers from using AI. The tool was literally costing MORE than the humans it was supposed to replace. They lied to you about AI adoption and now the whole narrative is blowing up: Microsoft gave thousands of engineers access to Claude Code six months ago and encouraged them to use it. Engineers loved it and adoption exploded. But then the invoices arrived. Token-based pricing means every query, every code review, every debugging session costs money. At scale across 100,000 engineers, the numbers became so large that Microsoft issued an internal order to cancel nearly all Claude Code licenses by end of June and force everyone onto their own cheaper tool instead. The company that invested $5 billion in Anthropic just told its own people to stop using Anthropic's product because it costs too much. Uber's story is even worse... Their CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information that the budget he planned for the full year was "blown away already" by April. Uber had rolled out Claude Code in December 2025. By March, 84% of their 5,000 engineers were using it with 70% of all committed code coming from AI systems. Heavy users were burning $500 to $2,000 per month each. Naga himself spent $1,200 in a single two-hour demo session. The company had even built internal leaderboards ranking engineers by how much AI they used. They literally gamified the spending and then ran out of money. Now look at what Nvidia's own VP of applied deep learning Bryan Catanzaro said to Axios last month. Direct quote: "For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees." This is a VP at the company that SELLS the chips saying that using AI is more expensive than paying humans. Think about what this means for the entire AI narrative. Every CEO on every earnings call for the past two years has said the same thing: AI will make us more efficient, reduce headcount, and cut costs. The stock market rewarded every company that said it. Fired workers, stock goes up. Announced AI adoption, stock goes up. But the actual companies deploying AI at scale are discovering the math doesn't work. The MORE employees use AI, the HIGHER the bill. Goldman Sachs forecasts a 24x increase in token consumption by 2030 as companies adopt AI agents. Gartner just published a report showing that even though individual token prices will drop 90% by 2030, total enterprise AI costs will go UP because agents consume exponentially more tokens per task than basic tools. Meta built an internal dashboard called "Claudeonomics" to track which employees use the most AI. Amazon started pushing engineers to "tokenmaxx," their internal term for consuming as many AI tokens as possible. Both companies are spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure this year alone. And Microsoft, the company that bet its entire future on AI, just told 100,000 engineers to stop using the tool they liked best because the per-token bills got out of control. The companies building AI are telling investors it saves money. The companies using AI are finding out it costs more than the humans it was supposed to replace. And even the company that makes the chips just admitted it through its own VP. This is the gap nobody on Wall Street is pricing in. $725 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year across Big Tech. And the first companies to actually deploy these tools at scale are already pulling back because the economics don't work. What do you think?

As AI agents become more powerful, they won’t just help you get things done. They’ll be able to pay for services, coordinate tasks and exchange value on your behalf. That’s why Agentic Payments matter. They’re becoming the financial layer of the AI economy. Agentic Payments are emerging as the financial infrastructure for a machine-driven economy, enabling real-time, programmable and borderless transactions between agents, services and networks 🌐

The decentralized future is not just about creating new applications; it’s about rethinking how we organize society. You shouldn’t have to trust any single person, institution, or centralized organization to transact and get things done.” —Vitalik Buterin, Co-founder of Ethereum

⚡️ INSIGHT: Vitalik Buterin says ZK-payments could become the next standard for crypto payments in the AI-driven “agentic era.”

Agentic commerce is developing quickly. My guess is that adoption might be slow at first and then fire 🔥

Does AI own checkout? The answer in 2026 is NO. OpenAI launched and pulled back Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT within months. Conversion was bad. Gemini actually does the same as OpenAI, but the direct checkout is buried deep, you have to ask Gemini to specifically use "UCP in-app checkout" to invoke it. Users don't trust buying inside a chatbot, still. The outlier is Claude. Claude's MCP is purely product discovery. No checkout. If you want to buy, it redirects you to the browser with items selected. It's clean and does NOT even invoke without merchant connector enabled in settings. (img 1) The one I am really excited about is Stripe. At Sessions 2026 they introduce a one-time, intent-specific, time-limited checkout using agents. (img 2). Stripe is also shipping MPP and Tempo for crypto to enter checkout. I expect Stripe to ship bigly in 2026 for AI commerce. See Stripe Link's demo by @stevekaliski. AI doesn't own checkout. Yet. But it will.

ANTHROPIC JUST RELEASED THE OFFICIAL PLAYBOOK FOR BUILDING A COMPANY WITH CLAUDE CODE. CEO: 1 human. Employees: AI agents. Operations: fully automatic. The zero-headcount company is no longer a joke.

As @jenzhuscott admits, she was being sarcastic in her use of “overcapacity”. Isn’t it more of a case of being market savvy? Not only responding to what the market is demanding, but then building on that with next-step innovation. Maybe it starts with imitation, but it doesn’t end there.

Is China at overcapacity? Yes, and since 700 AD. The iconic Lion of St. Mark’s was made in circa 700 AD during Tang dynasty and shipped to Venice. Silverware like spoon and fork were exported in huge numbers to America and Europe in 1800s cos production was faster and cheaper. Sounds familiar? So “Made in China” overcapacity has been running for over 1,300 years. The 20th century was just blip.

The AI world needs more of these types involved, both in providing the framework for reasonable legislation as well as bringing wisdom to the CEOs / CTOs of the AI juggernauts.

Greed is an interesting driver

Excited to announce our partnership with @BAI_AGI to build the framework for an autonomous data economy. And @justinsuntron highlighting B. AI at Web3 Festival HK today. Timing couldn’t be better. Let’s build.

I guess crazy is contagious, or maybe it was just time for a new world order giving us a chance to prove we haven’t really evolved as a species. I’ve been re-watching Man in the High Castle, so I’m holding on to the theory of parallel universes, hoping there’s one where sanity prevails.

Pundi X co-founder Danny Lim @agintender will be attending Conviction 2026 in Vietnam 🇻🇳 to share how AI agents are shaping onchain interaction and where agentic payments go next. See you there 👊 📍Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 📅 August 14–15, 2026

Coinfest has been the OG crypto event in Indonesia and SEA since day one. Looking forward to be speaking at CoinfestAsia Bali. Come for the blockchain and AI sharing, stay for the Bali beach, bintang beer and human interactions. See you there. 🏖️