I had written about the agentic economy when I watched Yat Siu describe the machine economy. One sentence gave me a better way to explain an idea I had been circling for a while:
‘It wasn’t meant for humans. It was meant for machines.’
He also described Bitcoin as the proof of concept for the machine economy. In the conversation that prompted this post, he connected that claim to a problem anyone who has used a wallet can recognize. MetaMask still asks an ordinary person to manage keys, addresses, signatures, and irreversible transactions. ‘Code is law’ does not map cleanly to human behavior. If someone steals your Bitcoin, you still expect a police officer and a judge to care.
Machines operate in a different setting. An agent can read a contract, verify a proof, call a tool, and follow a permission boundary. It does not need a friendly wallet screen to understand a transaction. That idea connected blockchain to the work I have been doing with agents.
I expect DAOs to return once they abstract crypto-native protocols away from the people using them. I expect much of that work to begin on Solana.
I have watched the agent side improve
I have built hundreds, perhaps thousands, of agents. The count is less interesting to me than the change in their behavior. Tool calling and function calling have improved enough that agents can use a CLI with more care: inspect its help, read the current state, make a bounded change, and report what happened.
I expect blockchain tools to follow the same path. After learning how Solana works behind the scenes, I came away convinced that blockchains ask too much technical knowledge from most users. An agent can take a natural-language request, translate it into a proposed action, and expose the exact permission or payment a human needs to approve.
Agents can handle protocol interaction. Founders remain the decision-makers.
The DAO I would want as a founder
Co-founders still need the conversations that make a company real. They align through messages, calls, and Slack. They divide sales, marketing, and product work. They build in GitHub, then meet again to decide what changed and who should do what next. The cycle continues while the company earns revenue or seeks capital.
The difficult record-keeping often arrives later. Founders need to reconstruct contributions, commitments, and who paid for what before they make an equity or compensation decision.
I would use a DAO as a running record for that part of the work. Founders would define the responsibilities and keep the right to settle disputes. Bounded agents could record approved sales, marketing, and product contributions on-chain, prepare a payment or proposal, and keep the history available for review.
Founders must make equity decisions themselves. The record gives them evidence, but no contribution counter can judge the quality of a sale, a product decision, or the risk one founder carried at the wrong time.
Every action that changes money or ownership also needs a clear approval boundary. I would want the tool to show the wallet, amount, destination, and rule before it submits the transaction. Natural language belongs at the request. Deterministic permissions belong at execution.
Why I am watching Solana
Cost and settlement speed matter when an agent needs to make repeated, small, verifiable actions. I am watching Solana because Alpenglow remains in development with a roughly 150ms finality target and an expected Q3 2026 mainnet activation. The target may change, so I would measure a DAO on the network available today.
I wrote more about that tradeoff in The Solana Speed Window. Faster finality reduces the wait around an approved action. Founders still have to design fair rules, resolve disagreements, and decide which actions deserve an irreversible record.
The operating surface matters as much as network performance. A DAO built for human founders and their agents needs safe tools above the chain.
I do not know the interface yet
I am watching deterministic CLI tools that simplify protocol actions, Skill files that teach an agent how to use those tools, and Agent Plugins, a portable package format for reusable agent Skills and MCP servers. Any of those pieces could help an agent understand its capabilities and limits.
The useful system may combine them. A founder states an outcome in plain language. The agent proposes a bounded action through a tool with a narrow permission. The founder sees the exact transaction and approves it. The chain keeps the resulting record.
I will keep testing that idea with a small founding team that can turn its agreements, contributions, and approved payments into a record it trusts. That is a useful first proof for me.