Everyone is building a "settlement layer." There are two of them.
A new company has secured $8 million in pre-seed funding to build a settlement layer for the agent economy. The author distinguishes between two types of settlement layers: a payment rail for agent-to-merchant transactions and a trustless settlement mechanism for peer-to-peer value exchange across different blockchains. The funded company is focused on the latter, enabling conditional value exchanges without intermediaries. AI
IMPACT This funding signals strong market conviction in the need for autonomous agent transactions and infrastructure to support them.