Pantera Partner Explains How AI Agents Are Reshaping SaaS Business Models and Crypto Payments

Author: Paul Veradittakit (Managing Partner at Pantera Capital)

Compiled by Deep潮 TechFlow

Shenchao Overview: Over the past four decades of enterprise computing, the core business logic of the software industry has always been built on one unchanging premise: software is written by humans and ultimately sold as an efficiency tool for human use. Whether early packaged software or later cloud-based SaaS, enterprise software sales processes, pricing models, and procurement approvals have all been meticulously designed around human employees’ decision-making behaviors and collaborative habits.

However, in his latest macro insights, Paul Veradittakit, managing partner at Pantera Capital, one of the world’s leading crypto investment firms, presents a highly disruptive assertion: software is undergoing a paradigm shift—from being a productive tool that serves humans to becoming an autonomous agent with decision-making authority. As large language models and autonomous intelligent agents mature, the majority of enterprise purchasing decisions in the future will be made directly by AI, with software code itself emerging as the largest end customer.

This qualitative shift will trigger a chain reaction across the entire tech ecosystem. When buyers are no longer humans clicking on web pages, traditional sales funnels, UI interfaces, and credit card payment systems will become obsolete. In their place will emerge an entirely new infrastructure built on verifiable on-chain wallets, micropayment streaming protocols, and machine reputation systems. DeepTide TechFlow has provided a complete, direct translation of this forward-looking long-form article to show readers the dawn of a new software era as seen by technology investors.

We are witnessing a pivotal turning point where the business logic of enterprise software is being fundamentally reversed.

Software is no longer merely a digital tool that assists humans in improving work efficiency; in an increasing number of business scenarios, software is directly becoming the end purchaser.

For decades, marketing and product design across the tech industry have been built on persuading humans to spend money.

Companies pay their sales teams huge salaries and design elaborate, visually stunning graphical user interfaces—all just to get human procurement managers to click the approval button.

But when autonomous AI agents take over workflows, they don't need flashy UI dashboards—they require ultra-fast, low-latency, and highly reliable machine interfaces.

Agency procurement will fully shift from monthly per-user subscription models to micro-granular billing models based on number of calls, computational load, or even achieved business outcomes.

In this new buyer ecosystem, cryptographic native settlement and decentralized identity credentials will become the key commercial links connecting hundreds of billions of software buyers.

If the core of the previous cloud computing wave was moving software to the cloud, then the core of this current intelligent wave is empowering software with the authority to autonomously allocate capital and procure resources.

A modern software agent, to complete a market research report, needs to autonomously purchase high-value financial data, rent GPU inference computing power, and invoke third-party data cleaning APIs.

Within this closed loop, no human employee intervenes in individual order placements. All trades are automatically matched and settled in milliseconds by code.

Lead nurturing, business dinners, and lengthy contract negotiations in traditional commerce have completely lost their relevance in the face of machine buyers.

In recent in-depth conversations with leading entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley, we’ve observed a significant shift in the focus of frontline development teams.

An increasing number of teams are moving away from complex, human-designed front-end interfaces and fully embracing minimalist protocol-layer designs centered around APIs.

Software developers are beginning to realize that if your service cannot be easily discovered, invoked, and paid for by mainstream AI agents, your product will be invisible in the future of digital commerce.

Taking the industry-leading project Fission as an example, the new business landscape it presents is astonishing.

In this ecosystem, AI agents developed by different teams autonomously post demands, offer professional services, and instantly receive and make payments on a decentralized network.

There are no holiday shutdowns like those in traditional banks, and no high costs associated with traditional cross-border foreign exchange—the entire machine commerce world operates efficiently around the clock, without interruption.

Faced with this sweeping historical transformation, all tech-based startup teams must upgrade and reconstruct their cognitive frameworks as early as possible.

First, reevaluate your pricing and delivery architecture to support fine-grained, on-demand billing and native machine payment settlement as soon as possible.

Second, place high emphasis on machine readability and verifiability, enabling your product to be easily included in trusted whitelists by automated evaluation systems.

Finally, closely monitor the underlying cryptographic infrastructure, as it is the solid foundation upon which the next trillion-dollar software buyers will be built.

In addition to agency business, we are also closely monitoring the latest developments in the cryptocurrency industry regarding commerce, regulation, and product innovation.

From traditional financial institutions accelerating their exploration of on-chain asset tokenization to major global jurisdictions gradually clarifying regulatory boundaries, the tide of compliance is paving the way for institutional capital to enter the market.

The evolution of technology never depends on human will. When software becomes the largest customer, the entire value landscape of the digital economy will be completely reshaped.