Your Next Million Paying Users Won’t Be Humans

🎤 Full Interview: Craig DeWitt, Founder @ Skyfire

From Ripple to Reinvention

Craig DeWitt spent eight years at Ripple, helping design one of the most ambitious visions in financial infrastructure—frictionless global payments.

But his next move, Skyfire, isn’t about human money transfers.

It’s about something more profound: how machines will pay, charge, and transact in the age of autonomous AI agents.

When Craig saw early agent platforms struggling to interact with real-world systems—hitting walls at every login, CAPTCHA, and payment gateway—he realized the web wasn’t built for agents.

So he decided to build a new one.

The Hidden Problem: Agents Can’t Pay

AI agents today are powerful, but powerless.

They can reason, plan, and even chat—but they can’t buy data, pay for APIs, or access protected sites.

• They lack verified identity (websites see them as bots).

• They lack payment credentials (they can’t swipe a card or own an account).

• They lack trust mechanisms (no way to authorize or throttle spending).

In Craig’s words, “Agents are the fastest-growing user base on the planet—and yet they’re treated like intruders.”

Skyfire exists to fix that.

When Lawsuits Lit the Path

The breakthrough came after major lawsuits hit large language models for scraping copyrighted content.

It was the first sign of a new reality: AI needs to pay for what it consumes.

Craig recognized the opening, if agents could pay, they could become legitimate economic actors.

What began as a payments problem quickly evolved into a vision for agentic commerce: a world where every AI system can transact directly, instantly, and fairly.

The Skyfire Stack

Skyfire gives every agent two things it’s been missing:

1. Identity – a KYA (Know Your Agent) verification layer that issues each agent a JWT identity token, recognized by partner sites and APIs.

2. Payments – a digital wallet that lets agents hold stablecoins and soon tokenized cards, enabling micro-payments as small as fractions of a cent.

Here’s how it works in the wild:

It’s like OAuth meets Stripe—but built for machines.

Inside the Agentic Commerce Workflow

This makes agents “first-class citizens” on the internet.

They can browse, buy, and transact—without human workarounds.

The Breakthrough: Turning Agents into Customers

Skyfire didn’t just theorize this—it’s already happening.

When the platform launched, developers and marketplaces flooded in, looking for a way to monetize their APIs and data for AI agents.

Partnerships with bot-protection and API providers let them both allow and charge for agent access safely.

A key example is Appify, an early Skyfire partner:

Agents authenticate, access the platform, and buy tools in real time.

No human approval, no credit card input—just instant, verified commerce.

Guardrails: Compliance Meets Autonomy

One of Craig’s strongest convictions is that the future of AI commerce needs rules baked in.

Skyfire’s architecture includes:

• Spend policies – set at the developer or company level.

• Just-in-time approvals – agents ask for permission when spending exceeds limits.

• Fraud prevention layers – identity and payment verification every step of the way.

That’s how Skyfire balances freedom and security—autonomy with accountability.

The Skyfire “Agentic Flywheel”

Craig calls it a flywheel effect:

More agents use Skyfire → more sites start accepting agent payments → developers build agent-compatible services → demand compounds.

This is how the web upgrades itself—from human-first to agent-inclusive.

The Big Picture: The Rise of Machine Commerce

Craig’s prediction is bold but logical:

When that happens, Skyfire’s infrastructure will be the layer that connects all of it.

In his view, agentic commerce isn’t the future—it’s already here.

Every company that wants to serve the AI economy will need a way to verify, authorize, and charge non-human users.

Why It Matters

• For PMs → Unlock new revenue streams by treating agents as customers.

• For Engineers → Build agent-ready APIs and secure access flows.

• For Founders → Monetize data, tools, and content in an autonomous market.

• For Executives → Redefine productivity—humans focus on creative leverage while agents handle execution.

Skyfire is building the missing rails for this shift: the Visa layer of the agentic web.

The Ultimate Lesson: Build for the New User

Craig’s closing thought from the interview sums it up:

The companies that adapt early—integrating identity, trust, and payments for autonomous systems—won’t just survive the AI wave.

They’ll power it.

In this episode, we cover:

00:00 Intro & setup.

00:19 Skyfire = identity + payments so agents can act.

00:47 Agents as real users; buyers/merchants.

01:18 Lawsuits → paying for content/services.

02:17 Agents sign up, book, and pay on behalf.

09:04 KYA/JWT identity flow; Appify example.

10:29 Payment tokens & charge flow.

30:46 When agent commerce hits share of wallet.

32:15 Defining KYA + behavior history.

34:14 Policy gates & JIT approvals.

46:46 403 as the new “create account” billboard.

47:43 Identity token in headers; micro-fees.

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