Beyond the Monolith: How Decentralized Startups Are Fighting Big Tech for the Future of AGI

Ben Goertzel notes that for blockchains achieving the necessary scale will require overcoming technical hurdles related to decentralization, scalability and security. He also emphasizes the need for decentralized AI to compete with larger corporations dominating the field.

Engineering Challenges and the Path to Level 5 Commerce

In their February 2026 annual letter, co-founders of the financial services platform Stripe, Patrick and John Collison, addressed the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency, specifically regarding “agentic commerce”—the ability for AI agents to independently discover, decide and transact. While the report is optimistic about the long-term role of crypto, it highlights critical areas where current blockchain infrastructure is “not ready” for the demands of autonomous agents.

The Stripe founders characterize the current state of crypto for AI as similar to the mid-90s internet. They view the current limitations not as “deal breakers” but as “engineering challenges” that must be solved before the economy can move into “Level 5,” or fully autonomous, agentic commerce.

Stripe is betting heavily on this transition, having recently acquired the stablecoin platform Bridge and launched the Agentic Commerce Suite. These moves are designed to help businesses prepare for this shift while the underlying blockchain technology matures.

In the report, the founders identified two primary technical bottlenecks that currently prevent blockchains from serving as the primary rails for agentic commerce: cost predictability and transaction throughput. From Stripe’s perspective, blockchains need to support 1 million to 1 billion transactions per second (TPS) to progress.

Ben Goertzel, CEO of the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance and CEO of SingularityNET, views this forecast as “entirely plausible.” Goertzel notes that standard digital financial transactions during peak hours already reach into the millions, even when primarily generated by humans through intermediaries.

The shift to agentic commerce changes the scale by orders of magnitude. “Instead of a single person initiating an action, we have an entire team of agents operating autonomously,” Goertzel explained. “Rather than one entity, we get an entire squad generating transactions.”

Overcoming the Blockchain Trilemma

According to Goertzel, achieving the scale Stripe envisions requires overcoming several fundamental hurdles beyond raw speed. These include balancing decentralization, scalability, and security, as well as having agents not confined to a single network. Managing the vast volumes of information generated by autonomous squads and enabling direct peer-to-peer settlements and “elevated decentralized identity” are among other capabilities that blockchain must attain.

Goertzel suggests the solution is not a single, monolithic network, but a system of specialized networks—similar to a modern highway with dedicated lanes for buses, express traffic, and freight. “By separating traffic, we avoid gridlock,” Goertzel noted. “That’s exactly the kind of scalable architecture we need for agentic commerce: a network of shards, where each piece does one thing well and interacts seamlessly with the rest.”

The high-stakes race for AI supremacy is triggering a massive consolidation of power. Unlike the decentralized nature of blockchain, the AI sector is becoming an oligarchy dominated by tech titans investing billions in proprietary infrastructure. This concentration of influence has sparked scrutiny over whether corporate gatekeeping will supersede the public good.

Nevertheless, a resilient ecosystem of startups is launching a tactical counter-offensive. By leveraging agility, niche specialization and open-source collaboration, these smaller entities are betting that architectural diversity and ethical transparency will disrupt the monolithic status quo.

“We don’t come close to Google or Microsoft in size, but we’re reaching a scale that allows us to compete more effectively, moving closer to the level needed to make decentralized AI the dominant form of AI on the planet. One of our ‘secret sauces’ is the power of diversity. Being decentralized allows us to bring together people, communities, AI algorithms, and datasets from across the globe, in contrast to the monolithic approaches taken by large centralized entities,” Goertzel said.

He added that this strategic diversity becomes particularly powerful in the current industry context, where many leading researchers are realizing that simply building larger LLMs will not lead to AGI. “This is something we understood from the very beginning, which has guided our Hyperon approach to AGI and superintelligence,” Goertzel added.

To demonstrate its belief in the “cosmopolitan approach,” Goertzel’s SingularityNET, alongside AGI Society, has organized this year’s AGI-26 conference to explore ways different interpretations and approaches to general intelligence.

Meanwhile, Goertzel also shared his thoughts with Bitcoin.com News on how stakeholders can minimize the risk of AI being controlled by just a few entities or governments. He said:

“We need open, decentralized, and democratic methodologies across the entire AI pipeline: deploying and running AI systems at scale, ensuring data is supplied fairly, teaching AI systems broad human values, and making collective decisions about their development.”

According to Goertzel, combining open-source code with decentralized infrastructure and governance ensures that AI remains transparent, widely accessible, and “highly beneficial for humanity and other sentient beings.”

FAQ ❓

• What is agentic commerce? Agentic commerce refers to the ability of AI agents to independently discover, decide, and transact without human intervention.
• What challenges does current blockchain technology face for AI transactions? Key challenges include cost predictability and the need for transaction throughput of 1 million to 1 billion transactions per second (TPS).
• How is Stripe preparing for the future of agentic commerce? Stripe has acquired the stablecoin platform Bridge and launched the Agentic Commerce Suite to help businesses adapt to this transformation.
• What is the significance of the AGI-26 conference? The AGI-26 conference aims to explore diverse approaches to artificial general intelligence (AGI), promoting decentralized methodologies that benefit humanity.