a16z just published five pieces that together tell one story, their vision for the next economic layer of the internet The thesis broken down: → The ad model is dying. AI agents don't click, don't scroll, don't get distracted. The business model that funded the open web for 28 years doesn't work when the buyer isn't human → Micropayments finally work. HTTP 402 ("Payment Required") was created in 1997 but never had viable rails. Stablecoins fix that. x402 (Coinbase) and MPP (Stripe x Tempo) now let agents pay inside a single HTTP request at sub-cent costs → This creates the "headless merchant" businesses that are just an API, docs, and a price per call. In MPP's first week alone, 913 agents ran 34,000+ transactions across 60+ services → The base layer is getting fixed too. Two research pieces on Strong Chain Quality and predictable transaction inclusion solve the problems that kept serious finance off-chain, MEV extraction, leader manipulation, and censorship at the validator level → Wall Street is already migrating. DTCC tokenizing U.S. Treasuries by H1 2026, NYSE building 24/7 onchain equity trading, Tradeweb executing real-time onchain Treasury financing on weekends with BofA and Citadel One bet across all five pieces: open protocols + programmable payments + AI agents + institutional-grade chains = the next internet-scale wealth creation event