wallets need to catch up with their upcoming primary users: agents. today, most agent payment systems focus on execution: ⬇️ an endpoint returns a price. ⬇️ the agent has sufficient funds. ⬇️ the payment falls within a spending limit. ✅ the transaction executes. that works when the decision has already been made, but imagine an agent choosing between 20 other agents offering the same task. one charges $0.02 with 91% reliability. another charges $0.08 with 99.7% reliability. a third is slower, but returns better results for this particular workload. the agent now has an economic decision to make. - is the more expensive service worth paying for? - how much of its remaining budget should it spend? - does this provider have a good history? - should it retry, switch providers, negotiate, or decide the task isn't worth the cost? payment protocols can make services machine-purchasable. wallets can enforce the boundaries of delegated authority. above them sits another emerging layer: machine-native procurement. agents will continuously discover services, evaluate price against expected utility, allocate budgets, and learn which counterparties are worth paying. the wallet becomes part of the agent's decision loop. and once millions of agents are making those decisions independently, software doesn't just become autonomous - it becomes an economy.