Like Winnick, Leventhal said he thought blockchain technology could help solve this identity issue, but that other solutions might be possible and that existing identity management firms were likely to figure it out. “There is going to be an identity payload that people or their agent will carry with them,” he said.
Leventhal said that in the meantime it was likely that merchants would simply bear the risk of fraud, as they do currently in most “card not present” transactions, such as most ecommerce purchases, where no physical credit card is handed over and the customer is not physically there either.
He was also optimistic about the future of agentic commerce. “Innovators and entrepreneurs are going to find killer use cases and they are going to be impossible to resist,” he said. A lot of the current clunkiness of shopping through chatbots and using AI agents “will get abstracted away and this stuff will just become magical and any time you have magical software,” he said. “It just gets adopted.”
