In the beginning, there was the internet. But it wasn’t very good at the features that we know and love today, like being able to visit different webpages with ease, which in turn can pull real-time information from servers. Instead, tech whizzes such as the legendary Tim Berners-Lee developed a series of protocols like HTTP that would undergird the World Wide Web, creating the simple browsing experience that we take for granted today.
Proponents of AI would argue we’re in a similar place when it comes to agents. Everyone understands the appeal—imagine if you could have AI bots scurrying around to do your bidding, from booking flights to deploying a memecoin investing strategy based on Elon Musk’s tweets. Louis Amira, the former head of crypto & AI partnerships at the fintech giant Stripe, argues that the main reason that’s not possible yet is the lack of protocols allowing agents to speak with each other, as well as the myriad sources they need to access.
Amira and his cofounder, Stripe’s former head of crypto engineering David Noël-Romas, have raised $19.2 million for their new startup, Circuit & Chisel. Its first product is ATXP, a protocol that Amira described as the HTTP for agentic payments—and one that he hopes will maintain a more neutral stance than similar products already on the market, like Coinbase’s x402.
