Introducing Point Labs

We are witnessing the most significant capability jump in computing history. AI systems can now reason, code, negotiate, and act. Yet the infrastructure for machines to participate in the economy doesn't exist.

The Problem

Today's AI systems are economically dependent on human intermediaries. They cannot own assets. They cannot pay for services. They cannot receive payment. Every transaction requires a human in the loop—signing, approving, mediating.

This creates friction at every level. Agents that could book their own compute, pay for their own API calls, or receive compensation for their work are instead bottlenecked by human-centric financial rails built for a different era.

The result: we're building increasingly autonomous systems on infrastructure designed for manual oversight. The mismatch will only grow.

Our Thesis

The next wave of internet infrastructure will be built for machines, not humans.

This isn't about replacing human economic activity—it's about enabling a new layer of machine-to-machine coordination that operates alongside it. For this to work, we need:

• Native payment rails for agents — Systems where AI can hold value, authorize transactions, and settle payments without human signing ceremonies.
• Verifiable computation — Cryptographic guarantees that let machines trust each other's outputs without relying on reputation or identity.
• Programmable economic primitives — Smart contracts, escrow, and coordination mechanisms designed for autonomous participants.

What We're Building

Point Labs is a research organization focused on the economic infrastructure for machine intelligence. Our work spans several interconnected areas:

Agentic Payments

We're developing payment protocols that treat AI agents as first-class economic actors. This includes work on HTTP 402 infrastructure—bringing native payments to the web in a way that machines can use programmatically.

Machine Coordination

When agents need to collaborate, negotiate, or transact, they need protocols designed for their constraints. We're building the coordination layer for multi-agent systems operating in adversarial environments.

Cryptographic Verification

Trust between machines requires different primitives than trust between humans. We're researching how zero-knowledge proofs, attestations, and verifiable computation can serve as the foundation for machine-to-machine trust.

Why Crypto

Blockchain infrastructure offers properties that are uniquely suited to machine economic activity:

Permissionless access. Agents don't need accounts, approvals, or identity verification. They can participate in economic activity from day one.

Programmable money. Smart contracts enable complex economic logic—escrow, streaming payments, conditional transfers—that agents can invoke autonomously.

Global settlement. A single coordination layer that works across jurisdictions, without the fragmentation of traditional financial infrastructure.

Cryptographic guarantees. Verification that doesn't depend on trust, reputation, or legal recourse—exactly what's needed when the counterparty is a machine.

Building for the Future

The infrastructure for human economic activity took decades to build. The infrastructure for machine economic activity will be built in years.

Point Labs is contributing to this future through open research, protocol development, and collaboration with teams working on adjacent problems. We believe the most important work here is foundational—getting the primitives right so that others can build on top.

Follow our research. We're just getting started.