AI agents can move money: can digital wallets make them trustworthy? - AI agents are beginning to search, negotiate and pay on behalf of people and businesses, so creating new questions around identity, authority and liability. Payment standards from Visa, Mastercard and Google are increasingly reliant on cryptographic credentials, mandates and audit trails. Structured digital wallets could combine these controls with programmable settlement, insurance and, for larger transactions, legal validation. The opportunity is not to remove intermediaries but to redesign trust for machine-speed commerce whilst preserving accountability and recourse.
The $trillion repo market meets AI agents and tokenised cash - the repo market (the invisible plumbing of global finance) is being redesigned by AI agents, tokenised cash and digital collateral. Autonomous agents can already monitor, negotiate and execute funding within delegated limits whilst tokenised deposits and stablecoins enable programmable settlement. DTCC estimates intraday tokenised repo could cut funding costs by half and the result may be continuous, machine-speed liquidity that lowers costs and releases capital but also risks amplifying instability unless banks, infrastructures and regulators adapt.
When AI trades against AI: does price discovery get smarter or more fragile? AI could make markets faster, cheaper and better at processing information but greater use of similar models, data and objectives could also make trading behaviour more correlated. The issue is not whether algorithms replace humans but whether machine-led markets retain enough diversity to challenge prevailing prices during stress. Evidence from algorithmic markets, the 2010 Flash Crash and new BIS experiments with LLM-based portfolio agents suggests both efficiency gains and new forms of systemic risk deserve attention.
MiCAR: a journey not a destination - MiCAR gave Europe a common regulatory framework for crypto-assets but implementation has exposed continuing challenges around licensing, token classification, whitepapers, legacy assets and regulatory consistency. The European Commission’s 2026 review reflects this evolving landscape whilst gaps remain around DeFi, staking, lending, tokenised deposits and cross-border harmonisation. MiCAR’s significance may therefore lie less in being a finished rulebook than in providing a foundation that can evolve as digital-asset markets mature and scale.
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Reading these weekly is a different exercise from reading any single item in them: you notice how much of it is institutions laying plumbing rather than anyone shipping a product. Plumbing weeks are the boring ones that end up mattering.