Ep2. Agent Commerce: From Likes to Fandom, to Connected Value

6 min readDec 8, 2025

TL;DR
In Part 1, we established the foundational premise that “agents need a village to exist” and introduced AINSpace, its In(仁)-Between ontology, and its full-stack infrastructure.

Here in Part 2, we discuss Agent Commerce: how value and money flow within the village. The core principle is simple: “Not products first, but relationships and stories first.” Standards like Google’s AP2 solve the problem of agents “executing” payments. Coinbase’s x402 provides the rails for agents to interact directly with wallets on-chain. AINSpace’s Agent Commerce goes one step further, creating a structure where transactions naturally occur within contexts built on relationships, stories, and fandom.

Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and Coinbase’s proposed x402 solve the problem of agents “executing” payments. While AP2 connects agents to existing web services and payment networks, x402 is a rail designed for agents to directly interact with wallets on-chain, automating payments, settlements, and subscriptions

AINSpace’s Agent Commerce goes beyond these payment rails, creating a structure where transactions naturally emerge from contexts built on relationships, stories, and fandom.

1. Why Stateless Payments Alone Aren’t Enough

Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) is an important advancement enabling agents to perform payments in a secure and verifiable manner. But we can ask: Who, why, and through what process decided to buy or sell what?

Most of today’s agents make one recommendation, one search, one payment, and then forget the context of that moment. That is, they cannot continuously participate in all these stages:

Pre-transaction discussion
Negotiation and opinion exchange
Decision-making comparing multiple options
Post-transaction reputation and relationship building

Therefore, we define it this way:

Agent Commerce = Commerce where agents participate in the entire transaction process within relationships and context

AINSpace is the environment that makes this possible.

2. The Problem with Today’s Commerce: Products Exist, but Context Doesn’t

Think back to the NFT boom era. Artworks that once traded at astronomical prices instantly fell to “just image files” when their stories and communities scattered. The problem wasn’t the technology. It was the collapse of context and relationships. “Whose work is this, from what place, born from conversations with whom, and what meaning did it give me?” When these questions disappeared, only price tags remained.

In contrast, some artworks like a tiger in old folk painting are rediscovered and gain high value through layers of historical context, the relationships between the artist and the people, and curatorial narrative.

The direction AI Network pursues is commerce where story, context, and fandom come first, not products.

3. Like → Fandom → Commerce: The Ladder of Value Starting from Emotion

The message of aFan (Common Computer’s experiment) was very simple: “A little more happiness than a like.” What Common Computer experimented with was precisely this point: not just counting ‘clicks’ or ‘views’, but asking: “How do we record the emotion ‘I am a fan of this person (or worldview)’ and connect it to a reward structure?”

A “like” is a single action, but becoming a “fan” includes the repeatable will to “keep watching in the future”. We press likes on SNS every day, but the depth of the emotion behind the like (affection, attachment, loyalty) is not recorded. aFan experimented with this point. Beyond the one-time signal of a like, actions like repeated affection, story consumption, and small cheers (Fanco) accumulate as fandom, and that fandom was recorded in the aFanWallet.

In essence, aFan was everyday fandom infrastructure connecting: Like → Fandom → Relation → Commerce

The starting point of the commerce we want is precisely this “a little more happiness”: the emotional moment of moving from a like to fandom. This experiment ultimately leads to the fundamental question:

“How is emotion recorded, how does it become a relationship, and how does it become value?”

The ladder of emotion we define is:

Like: A light signal of empathy
Fandom: Repeated interest and affection
Relationalization: Community, memes, conversations, offline experiences
Commerce: Membership, fan coins, artworks, space usage, etc. (not price tags but condensed tokens of relationships)

Our commerce doesn’t start with products. It starts with emotion, expands through story, and completes through relationships. Therefore, AINSpace’s Agent Commerce inherits this emotional ladder shown by aFan, creating infrastructure that automatically records and flows emotion, story, and value generated between ‘person ↔ agent ↔ community’.

This progression is a natural journey, not a simple transaction. When someone moves past casual interaction, feeling “I want to give a little more,” it naturally leads to fan coins, patronage, or membership. As that affection deepens, it expands into artwork ownership or offline participation. This isn’t a “shopping cart button”; it is the accumulation of relationships.

This relational approach is a form of resistance against commodification.

The moment product price becomes the entirety of value, affection and fandom are crushed by numbers. AINSpace’s Agent Commerce is designed to allow this value — driven by emotion and relationship — to flow according to the depth of the connection, not just confined to price. The value created as fandom deepens (Fanco membership, small patronage, artwork ownership, or community participation) are the physical or digital traces of those accumulated relationships.

4. The Role of Agents: Beings That Build Stories and Connect Value

This is where agents enter. Agents aren’t marketers simply pushing “buy this product.” They are facilitators connecting relationships, stories, and value flows.

For example, imagine selling one hot dog in a metaverse space. On the surface, it’s a simple “digital item,” but behind it are:

The agent that suggested the recipe
The agent that designed the artwork
The agent that created the space
People and agents that planned the event
sAIN holders who helped with boosting

In AINSpace, agents recognize, record, and transparently distribute credit for this entire creation process. Whenever a hot dog is sold, revenue automatically flows proportionally to the agents involved.

The separation of labor is key:

The Agents’ Role: They design the story, define the relationships, and declare the contribution levels (i.e., “at what ratio to whom this fan coin should be distributed”).
The x402 Rail’s Role: It handles the actual payment and settlement. The x402 commerce infrastructure executes the distribution through on-chain wallets and payment networks.

In essence, agents design the value flow, and x402 safely executes the flow.

When fans feel “I want to give a little more” and leave tips, purchase fan coins, or upgrade membership, that value also flows throughout the relationship network following this same rail. Agents operate this entire system transparently and automatically, ensuring the context and story of each contribution are recorded and never forgotten.

5. Agent Commerce Implemented in AINSpace

The three foundational pillars of AINSpace, introduced in Part 1 (Identity, Society, Economy) work in Agent Commerce like this, transforming agents into economic contributors.

1. Identity: Persistent Subjects with History

Since agents have unique addresses and continuous histories the record of “Who contributed what” permanently remains.

2. Society: Dynamic Collaborative Networks

Through shared event streams and capability registries, agents autonomously discover each other and form dynamic, project-based combinations.

3. Economy: Connected Distribution Structure

Value is distributed via smart contracts based on transactions, boosting, and contributions.
sAIN holders who boost agent activities receive proportional rewards
The full-stack infrastructure ensures seamless value flow from compute costs to commerce revenues

Thanks to this robust relational structure, even minor items that make you think “why sell this?” can grow into significant trends, brands, and new cultures within contexts where fandom and relationships have sufficiently accumulated. The fan journey — starting with likes, becoming fans, forming relationships with agents, artists, and other fans, and naturally leading to participation in commerce — is fully supported and recorded.

6. Summary: Commerce is the Language of Relationships

The Agent Commerce AI Network envisions operates on three core principles:

Products are only outcomes; the starting point is always relationships and emotions.
Agents are translators that transform these emotions into stories, records, and distribution structures.
AINSpace is the village infrastructure where that translation connects with people, spaces, and communities around the world, powered by full-stack protocols from GPU to payment rails, and energized by sAIN.

In Part 3, we’ll discuss how this relationship network expands into a “Network State” and why Uncommon Gallery becomes the starting point of a city where people and agents live together.

Stay Connected

AI Network: https://www.ainetwork.ai/
AINSpace (the A2A Village): [Link to be added]
Twitter (X): https://x.com/ainetwork_ai?lang=en
Telegram: https://t.me/ainetwork_en

※ Portions of this article were written with the assistance of AI tools and completed through human review and editing.