# What 500,000 Settled Agent Payments Taught Us | Marcelo Kunze at Pragma Lisbon 2026

- Channel: [ETHGlobal](https://streameth.org/ethglobal)
- Date: 2026-09-09
- Duration: 12:37
- Topics: ETHGlobal, Pragma Lisbon 2026, Lisbon, 2026, Marcelo Kunze, Frames, AI agents, agent payments, agentic commerce, x402, paid APIs, tool discovery, payment routing, AI infrastructure, onchain payments, Pragma Lisbon, AI agent payments, 500000 agent payments, autonomous agent payments, AI commerce, machine payments, x402 payments, paid API marketplace, AI tool discovery, agentic payment infrastructure, AI payment routing, onchain agent economy, crypto AI agents
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-z0RDHFGgAj4
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0RDHFGgAj4

## Description

Marcelo Kunze, Co-founder of Frames, shares what the team learned from settling roughly 500,000 payments initiated by AI agents. He traces the product from an ETHGlobal finalist project through accelerators and a rebrand, describing an early prompt-based system that hid wallets, passphrases, and payment mechanics from users. Demand centered on paid data and API tools, such as social monitoring, lead enrichment, and brand intelligence, but rapid growth exposed a core problem: agents could discover many endpoints without knowing which tools were reliable or appropriate for a specific task. Kunze uses the Michelin Guide as an analogy for products that begin by helping a new market grow and later become valuable infrastructure in their own right. Frames followed a similar path. The early system made agent payments possible through a portable prompt, then the team observed what people actually purchased. Data services dominated, but manual endpoint selection and paid requests that sometimes returned empty results prevented agents from reliably completing larger workflows.

Frames used its transaction history to train a model that understands endpoint quality and handles routing, execution, payment, and validation as one workflow. A reliability system ranks tools as transactions succeed or fail, allowing performance to improve with usage and creating data that general web search cannot reproduce. Kunze positions Frames F1 as infrastructure for work beyond the public web: models can ask for an outcome while the system chooses and pays the right service. The lesson from agentic commerce is that payment rails matter, but dependable discovery and verified execution are what turn a directory of tools into a useful market. The accumulated payment history became a proprietary training and evaluation set. Frames can see which tools were selected, whether they executed successfully, what result was returned, and how often an endpoint failed for a particular task. That evidence supports routing and validation decisions that a general model cannot infer from documentation or search results alone. Kunze presents the system as an adaptive market for machine services.

00:00 Introduction and Michelin Guide Analogy
00:48 Discovery and Trust for Agent Payments
01:34 MCPay Begins at ETHGlobal Prague
02:02 From Finalist to Accelerator Support
02:42 Building a Wallet for AI Agents
03:12 A Curated Registry of Paid Tools
03:48 Prompt-Based Wallet Abstraction
04:14 Lessons From Five Hundred Thousand Payments
04:52 Demand for Data and Enrichment APIs
05:20 The Endpoint Selection Problem
06:03 Paying for Empty API Results
06:36 Replacing the Guide With a Smart Engine
07:22 Building a Composite Model
08:29 Fine-Tuning on Transaction History
08:55 Routing, Execution, and Payment
09:20 Validating Results Before Charging
09:48 Tool Reliability From Success and Failure
10:20 Live Options Data Example
10:48 Frames F1 and Proprietary Data
11:14 Comparing Frames With General Models
11:48 Why Agents Choose Reliable Companies

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🇵🇹 *Pragma Lisbon 2026*
Pragma Lisbon 2026 was held on June 25th at the Carlos Lopes Pavillion in Lisbon, Portugal and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma Lisbon 2026 YouTube Playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMxB4xW8JYdk

ETHGlobal's Pragma series takes place in cities around the world, and is designed to be a different kind of event. Pragma is a one-stage conference with founders-only on stage, bringing together a small group of curated attendees and speakers to discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. 

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