[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] "Apps, websites and buttons will disappear. Money will no longer move through screens."

David Marcus (데이비드 마커스), chief executive of Lightspark, recently made the prediction in a post on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, titled “The Death of the Interface”.

Marcus also led Meta’s Messenger assistant project “M” in addition to Libra when Meta was known as Facebook.

Neither turned out well, and looking back now, the reason was starting too early, he said. Marcus said M was shut down because its automation rate did not exceed 30 percent, and Libra was scrapped for political reasons. He added that AI models are now good enough and stablecoins like Libra are written into law in the United States and Europe.

He said people have spent the past 40 years learning menus and buttons and adapting to computer language. Going forward, computers will understand people’s language, he said. Without opening an app and pressing buttons, users can simply speak or type as if asking a person, and the task is done, he said. He said the role of the operating system will also change. Today’s OS serves as a gateway that runs apps, but an AI agent that users address directly will take the OS’s place, he said. Marcus said companies that control the agents that win in the market will become the most powerful companies of this era.

Money could be the problem here.

He said banking apps, payment pages, card entry fields and text-message verification codes were mostly built on the assumption of a screen. Authentication, fraud prevention and dispute handling are also based on the assumption that a person sits in the middle. But when a customer agent buys goods from a company agent, there is no payment page and no person to receive an authentication code. Stablecoins alone have limits in filling such gaps.

Marcus said stablecoins become more useful only when combined with a fast settlement network, embedded wallets, domestic and cross-border fiat payment networks, and card networks.

He summed up his solution as “headless money”. He said the core is to tie together four elements — a fast settlement network, embedded wallets, domestic and cross-border fiat payment networks, and card networks — with simple APIs without screens, so agents can send and receive money immediately when needed. He said that makes scenarios more plausible in which, after someone says a fence must be repaired before the weekend, an agent agrees a price with a contractor’s agent, pays a deposit and then pays the balance when completion photos arrive.

Marcus said a company agent should be able to send payments every Friday to 400 contractors spread across 30 countries. He said transfers should be completed within seconds, regardless of whether the recipient uses a bank account, mobile wallet or card. He said that requires 24-hour real-time settlement and low fees. He added that people must be able to set limits, grant agents spending authority and revoke it immediately, and it must also be clear who bears losses when an agent sends money to the wrong place.

He also said a major reason the first wave of agent shopping got off to a slow start was that it borrowed payment methods designed for people. He said models are sufficient this time and laws are in place. What is missing is money that agents can use without screens, he said.

He said several companies with enterprise values of hundreds of billions of dollars will emerge in the market for currency infrastructure used by agents. He also acknowledged Lightspark is working on this and that his view is biased.

Marcus left Meta in November 2021 and founded Lightspark, which specialises in backend infrastructure related to the Lightning Network, a Bitcoin layer-two project.

Lightspark develops backend infrastructure needed by companies, developers and merchants that want to transact on the Lightning Network. The Lightning Network is a protocol developed on Bitcoin, focused on supporting fast processing of small Bitcoin transactions.