Lightspeed's Aaron Frank: agentic commerce is inning one — stablecoins won't fix the payment rails problem

Summary

Aaron Frank, a partner at Lightspeed and former founder of Final (the credit card company that became Apple Card), sees agentic commerce as early-stage and argues that stablecoins will not solve its core constraint.

The bottleneck is payment rails and merchant economics, not currency. Shopify charges a 4% transaction fee for agentic orders, which is economically untenable for most merchants. Walmart refuses Apple Pay over a 15-basis-point fee. At scale, agents need to be more efficient than card rails, not more expensive. E-commerce requires either higher basket sizes or checkout conversion rates to offset the cost premium, and neither is guaranteed.

Frank sees a fraud and trust problem that the market underestimates. When an agent arrives at a merchant's checkout, the merchant cannot verify whether it is legitimate or fraudulent. Traditional checkouts have multiple fraud layers, and merchants track individual consumers across transactions. Agents break that model. An agent making 50 requests from the same IP in one day looks like either a bot attack or a compromised account. Merchants lose the downstream transaction-level tracking they maintain for individual consumers.

On stablecoins specifically, Frank is direct about their limits. They will not drive adoption by offering lower fees. Merchants have no incentive to undercut Visa and Mastercard when the incumbents already control distribution and market power. Stablecoins work as a store of value, especially globally, where they allow citizens in countries like Venezuela to access dollars without currency risk. That benefit is separate from solving agentic commerce's cost structure.

Lightspeed has backed infrastructure plays including Radius Technology, an L1 blockchain that emerged from the Federal Reserve's defunct Project Hamilton and promises more than a million transactions per second. Frank acknowledges that L1 launches alone do not create use cases. Adoption is the constraint.

The real value of stablecoins is geopolitical and monetary. They let the U.S. dollar function as a global reserve currency without friction. Citizens in unfriendly or economically unstable countries can hold dollars directly. Frank calls that demonstrable. Everything else—lower transaction fees, agentic commerce efficiency, payment innovation—flows downstream from that core function.

On his investing thesis more broadly, Frank prioritizes people over thesis fit. He looks for founders he can call at 9 PM and talk to until 11. He runs the Very Stable Conference, held March 5 in San Francisco, designed to bring two or three decision-makers from each major company into one room to create serendipity. Last year's event generated at least two deals between founders and tier-one VCs working on stablecoins. His bar is simple: find weird humans building interesting things, then get out of their way.