AI Agents, USDC, and the Programmable Economy | thirdweb (Furqan Rydhan) | Builder Series]

But we the most interesting stuff that we see is when agents are actually putting it into their tool set so that, hey, I can make an image really great, but you have to pay me one USDC, and then I'll give you an image. And so it could receive the USTC, verify that it got the money and sent it back. And I think this is something we just can't see in the traditional world. Like, you know, if you pay me with credit card, I give you an image, a month later you do a charge back, it's done. And so the beauty of USTC being verified and on chain and kinda concrete is incredible for agents, when we start seeing agent to agent economies form. And I think that's gonna be kind of exceptionally explosive.

Today, we're talking about the collision course between two of the biggest waves in tech, AI and crypto. To explore what happens when these two worlds truly connect, I'm joined by Furukan Rydan, who is been building since the dot com era. He's cofounded companies like AppLovin and Bebo, and today, he's behind ThirdWeb, a platform that's reshaping how developers build web three apps.

Welcome to the builder series where we spotlight visionaries transforming technology and innovation with USDC and the Circle developer platform. Furcon, I am super excited to have you here. Before we dive in, I really wanna start off off the back and and learn how did you first come across USDC. I know it ended up playing a role in in some of the earliest third web tools.

Yeah. I mean, I I got into crypto kind of accidentally. I'm a bit of a nerd, and, I'm on just some forums back, I don't know, in twenty ten and learned about this thing called Bitcoin from that. And I ended up downloading the Bitcoin miner, and I ran it on my computer, and it was it felt like a virus.

My computer started kind of fretzing out. And so that was my introduction to cryptocurrency. I got excited about the peer to peer technologies and I've been kind of like a builder investor nerd about this ecosystem since then. You know, think USDC was interesting for me because we use, you know, I live in America, we use dollars all day, we use digital dollars using credit cards and it felt like there needed to be a representation of that on chain so that you could do all the programmatic capabilities of crypto but I wasn't looking for the price variation.

I was looking at something more stable. And that's how when I first saw USTC, it clicked for me that, oh, ****. This makes sense. You know?

You've seen a lot of shifts. Dot com, mobile, web two.

Now we've got AI and blockchain converging. I'm curious from your perspective, what do you think is driving that convergence, and and how do you see AI influencing what's possible on chain?

They're very different in one aspect. So, you know, the similarity is they're brand new, and we don't know yet how it impacts everything both for AI and crypto. But I think the difference is crypto is kind of like a different format, a different platform to kind of operate from and it gave us some new capabilities. You know, public infrastructure that's shared, that's verified, that we could all use, that's available to everyone.

I think it's similar to bridges and highways or parks. Right? These are public places that we have in the physical world. We all get to share it.

There's some rules, you know, just just be a good person, kind of clean up after yourselves and do those things.

And, you know, the Internet has been mostly private. Right? Private roads, driveways and I think crypto kind of unlocks this new capability and we've definitely seen it in the financial world just completely change everything in terms of how we know and I think that's kind of happening to the rest of the Internet. For AI, I don't think of it as an industry. Actually think of it as kind of a different layer that's kind of like the Internet or cloud and the analogy that I typically give people is early computers and just getting that UI was so cool.

I could point, click, see things, interact with it. That was the first interface that we got from computers. Right? It was a UI.

That was kind of one of the biggest shifts. And the second one was the Internet. It brought us API. It made it so that systems can communicate with each other.

You know, cloud was an accelerant, maybe it was a ten x, AI feels like a hundred x type technology, we can program the way we think into these things and it could reproduce it over and over again and it's gonna significantly increase the amount of digital work that happens, the quality of work that happens and just kind of the underpinning of everything. And so while there's similarities to AI, I just don't know how to kind of grasp it into the same, you know, kind of scale, it just feels bigger.

Alright. So let's keep going, man. We we started we're starting to hear a lot, I mean, about AI agents. Right? I mean, that don't just analyze or write, but actually freaking act and act on chain. And I wanna dive now into into Nebula. Initiate something like a transaction.

What's actually happening under the hood?

Yeah. So Nebula, just so people kinda know a little bit of what it is, is our kind of view of how AI should understand blockchains. And we found a lot of problems with the existing AI systems and just understanding this new technology set. First, blockchains move, you know, their technology has updated so quickly, so rapidly every month or two.

There are major changes and just having that understanding of the types of things you can do. Second, the core knowledge of how does the EVM work, how does a smart contract work, what does it do, what does this particular smart contract do, stuff like that. And so we developed Nebula so that there is a kind of, you know, top tier AI model out there in the world that can understand everything. What is what Nebula does is it takes that request, it understands it tries to create some understanding, so it has a reasoning brain.

It'll say, okay. What's the intent of the user? What are they trying to do? You know?

And then how are they trying to do And so when we take that request and it'll look at it, it'll understand, one, I am trying to actually do an action. That's the first thing it'll determine. Are you trying to research data? Are you trying to read information?

Are you trying to write to kind of the blockchain? In this case, because we're doing this swap, we're trying to write. Now there's no existing way to do a swap. Right?

Like the blockchain doesn't have that. Some piece of software out there on the blockchain, whether it's a you know decentralized exchange or some sort of other mechanic like that will actually do the function of it. The cool thing is Nebula can actually write new code too. So you're not limited to templates, you're not limited to even what's available already on the chain.

So Nebula can act, you know, can deploy things that are off the shelf that are available through Third Wave. It can find things that are already on chain. So any protocol that exists out there in the world, it can interact with it. But also if there isn't the thing that you wanna do, it can write code and today we have it both writing Python code internally to do more complex tasks.

So I wanna deploy this NFT contract, I wanna mint ten to me, ten to Sam and then we wanna sell thirty of them. It can kinda write Python codes or just in time live to go and stitch those things together and then by the way if we wanted a really cool mechanic on the NFT like, me and Sam have to both sign off on this person before they can buy our thing. It could even customize that thing live before it deploys it to say, hey, we need some new code here. We should be able to kinda do that.

It'll verify it. It'll check it. It'll look at kind of how it works, simulate it to make sure it could do the right task. And so it's not really limited to templates, it's not kind of off the shelf stuff, it's totally dynamic as if you had a serious blockchain engineer on your team just sitting there and could understand your product or what your goals were, that's what Nebula can achieve.

That's wild, that's wild. So man. Alright. So, like, I'm I'm wondering too, like, so with moving USDC, right, it means dealing with gas, security, real value. How does Nebula, I guess, help abstract some of those complexities?

Yeah.

So first is it understands USDC.

It understands the right USDC, meaning the the proper contract that's official and verified. It knows that inherently. Second, you know, agents themselves, they need wallets and so Nebula kinda brings that to the equation. It can put in a smart account that can be acted on.

It could be a third web smart account. It could be any other wallet that exists out there in the world as well. And what it can do then is it can ask for permission to either autonomously act on your behalf or ask you for confirmation. And so let's say I just wanted to set up an agent that every day sends you a random amount between ten cents and fifty cents of USDC and it's just kind of a fun gimmick and I'm just sending it.

It could wake up and it could do that and I've said, hey, one dollar in this account. You can go wild, do whatever you want. Or, hey, I'm doing larger transactions. I'm doing kind of major functions.

I want you to think about it and decide before you actually do the thing, ask for my permission. And giving the agent, you know, capabilities of the wallet, embedding it in has really unlocked us an ability, its ability to kind of act. A wallet is partly your gateway into the blockchain. Right?

So like Right. You can read the blockchain however you want but to act you actually need to sign something and that comes from that and so does Nebula have a wallet and understands how to use it, It has deep, you know, what we call it x in a wallet execution agent. It has deep understanding of what it takes to sign transactions, craft transactions, interact with functions that are on chain. And, you know, so when we're looking at something like a USDC, you know, pretty easy.

There's a transfer function. We call it. That's gonna go ahead and kinda transfer the money from my wallet to the destination. But, you know, as we go further, I might be using USDC in a DeFi platform.

I might be buying an NFT with USDC. And so it would also understand how to call this other function over there and use a USDC in my wallet.

And the last thing is because again the third web developer stack is embedded inside Debula, I might only have USDC in my wallet. The person selling the thing might be selling it in some other token. And so in flight, it could just swap from USDC to the token that we need. It could use the programmatic functions of cryptocurrency right away without you even knowing it.

And so it takes a lot of these complexities, makes it really seamless to kind of interact with. Now, the interface here, so there's human interfaces, you could type to it and you could do things, I think that's pretty cool, that's like chat, that's like a human driving things but we the most interesting stuff that we see is when agents are actually putting it into their tool set so that, hey, I can make an image really great but you have to pay me one USTC and then I'll give you an image. And so it could receive the USTC, verify that it got the money and sent it back and I think this is something we just can't see in the traditional world like, you know, if you pay me with credit card, I give you an image, a month later you do a chargeback, it's done and so the beauty of USDC being verified and on chain and kind of concrete is incredible for agents, especially when we start seeing agent to agent economies form.

And I think that's gonna be kind of exceptionally explosive.

Hey. Look. I wanna thank each and every single one of you builders for taking the time to watch this video. And as a special thank you, I'm offering a hundred dollars in credits towards Circle's developer services.

That's right. Sign up today at Circle dot com forward slash build. That's b u I l d to automatically receive yours. How far can that go?

Well, look, that's enough for about one month of managing two thousand active wallets, or it could go towards two hundred thousand smart contract platform API calls, or you know what? You could even use those to sponsor network fees. Make sure to go ahead and sign up right now. That's circle dot com forward slash build to receive your hundred dollars in credits now.

Why did you pick blockchain? Like, what's the reason for it?

And they said, actually, we explored building it in a traditional way with the database and doing it ourselves and guaranteeing it, making it secure, and we explored it three or four other ways. And actually blockchain was the best way for us to do it.

And I think that statement is what is the change factor, right? And when that starts happening at a higher velocity, it's already happening. And we're seeing 10x more of that than a year ago and a year ago we saw 10x more of that than the year before. So while that number maybe isn't reaching everybody yet, it is moving at an exponential pace and the capability is starting to become much easier.

I'll use a very different technology set, self driving cars. You know, if you go back ten years ago, it's kinda starting, there's all these rumors of, you know, big investments happening. Few years later, self driving cars are never gonna happen, they're all failures, whatever. Right.

You know, if you come to San Francisco, there's Waymo's running all day every day. There's more Waymo's at night than human drivers.

Crazy, man. Like, I'm I'm going to San Francisco, getting at a stoplight, looking over and it's a car with nobody in it.

Two actually back to back.

And it's wild and they're there and now it feels like, okay, like I've seen it here, I go around the world, I go to different cities, it's not but that's probably gonna happen very fast now that it works. And I think the moment that, like, it works and it's not us, you know, like, guessing, hey, is it working or not? When something works, it's so obvious it's it's just happening. Right?

Like, you're pushing this ball up a hill, at some point you get over the top and it just starts going and it starts going faster. And so I don't know when the top of the hill is but I do know the moment it happens, it's gonna happen what feels like instantly because it's kind of this explosive technology set. I think there's a need to actually develop new jobs and the internet is gonna create new jobs. You know, creators for example, you know, YouTubers, live streamers, these jobs didn't exist ten years ago.

There's over a hundred thousand streamers that make a living wage. There's over a few hundred thousand YouTubers that make a living wage like fifty, sixty, eighty k a year by creating content. And I think more and more of the new jobs are gonna be digital.

They're gonna be Internet native. They might be within apps and I think crypto underpins all of it because this is a format where these mechanics can happen. I can use your app and provide value to it. I could be a curator, a moderator, a reviewer, you know, on Yelp, I just get a little badge that says I'm elite.

Right. Man, I really contributed to the success of Yelp to some degree by doing that. Reddit moderates. So these jobs have existed on the Internet, they haven't been paid for in kind of deep ways and I think, you know, crypto's gonna underpin a lot of that.

People are gonna want to pay their bills with it, so USDC is a perfect choice because I get this thing that feels like income and then I could use it in kind of other ways and so I think crypto's gonna help create a lot of jobs on the Internet and I think that's an important function now as work is becoming easier to create and that's gonna create these kind of secondary effects and so I'm very excited for that. I think it's a huge responsibility for every entrepreneur out there to think about how many jobs are we creating? You know, how are we creating things that allow people to not to earn a living wage, to make money, to, you know, pay the bills, to kinda do a variety of things and, you know, crypto has a lot of mechanics that allow that, new ways to program money, to move it around, to make sure that my work gets its reward and it's encoded in and so to me, there's this other part of the intersection where I think crypto is actually gonna help AI a lot by developing this new set of stuff that people are gonna need to do.

Man, you know what, Furcon? This has been really one of those conversations that, you know, it it inspires me as as I'm talking to you, and and it just makes you really just get super excited. You know? Like, I I I'm happy to be able to share this conversation with developers, you know, really just to rethink what's possible.

AI agents that think and transact, you know, blockchain infrastructure, and everything you said about USDC, you know, acting as that that trust layer, you know, for transactions and and really this whole new economy.

You know, for for builders that are listening, you know, and wanna explore Nebula or or start playing with these tools, where's the best place for them to go?

Yeah. They could go to nebula dot third web dot com, and just get started right away. It's free. So you just, you know, type in an email address or sign in with any wallet and you get going. There's buttons there to go and find the API docs and go and, you know, it's our building agents around it.

You know, so it's very easy to get started at nebula dot third web dot com.

Awesome. Awesome. Look, Furkan, it's really been incredible talking with you. I know that you have very limited time, so I tried to cram it as much as I could.

You know, I wanna thank you for joining. I wanna thank everyone for listening. Definitely, please check out their web. Make sure to follow for a con. I do on on x. He's he posts great stuff, inspirational things, always getting insight in what's, ticking in his brain, which I love.

Join our community, folks. Visit Circle dot com forward slash Discord. Let's continue the conversation. If there's you know, you wanna start doing some workshops on Nebula, I'm I'll be happy to reach out to Furcon, and we can get those things activated within our community because I'm sure a lot of you would be interested in doing so. Any any final thoughts, Furcon, before we leave?

This was awesome. We'll definitely have to do another one and, you know, build with Nebula. It's a very exciting time and, you know, send me stuff that you're working on. I'm always excited to see anything in the space, AI, crypto, the intersection of it. So hit me up on x, but, appreciate the time today and this was awesome.

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Take care. And take care from the Builder Series.

Bye. Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Circle Builder Series.

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