Beyond the Lethal Trifecta: Agentic Commerce on the Open Internet — David Levine, Kiduna Club

[music]

>> Okay, well, this is the very last

session of the entire conference. I hope

you guys have had a great time and we're

going to try and keep the energy high

for the very end. So, we're going to

cover

the lethal trifecta

and most importantly how to get past it.

So, for those of you who don't know, the

lethal trifecta is what is keeping us

from having true agentic commerce, a

full economy on the open internet.

So, the agentic economy starts right

here, right now.

And to really explain this, I want to go

way back in time to November 1993 when I

was at the wedding of a college

roommate.

And a friend of mine there gave me this

little piece of paper and said, "You've

got to join us on the MOO."

And that paper said

lambda.park.xerox.com port 8888.

And this being the '90s, I walked down

the block once I got home to Egghead

Software, bought a 9600 baud modem,

plugged it in, and

my old life ended. Um

uh that's a beautiful blonde girl in my

bed and I was sitting there on the MOO

uh in the

coat closet. And the reason was

you had a real sense of community. It

was like the true virtual world where

it was just text, but it didn't feel

like text. And there was a reason for

that, this concept of composability. So,

someone would come up with a cool It was

all just nouns and verbs. Someone would

come up with a really cool program

and everybody would then change their

player class to that program so they

could morph, they could create a

motorcycle out of a scooter, they could

do all kinds of things because it had

coherence within the entire universe.

And all of this was running on this guy

Pavel Curtis' Spark 10

sitting somewhere in Xerox Park. It

seemed like this infinite world, but it

was just this little box.

And this was big enough that there were

books written about it like my friend

Julian Dibell wrote My Tiny Life.

The magic came from four things all

composing together. The governance, how

it was run, there was an architectural

review board, wizards, etc. The

technology was all right there. The

economics, it was all funded by Xerox

Park, and the culture was most

important. A lot of people don't really

think about or understand culture.

So what happened between 1995

and 2025? Over the course of 30 years,

all of these communities, all the things

that in the early days of the internet

people really loved just got crushed by

platforms. They got crushed by

algorithms.

Because platforms and algorithms are by

their very nature extractive. They look

for whatever value they can remove from

whatever that community is. So if you

have a group on Facebook or LinkedIn or

wherever, what they're doing is saying,

"Okay,

this advertising message is more

important or I can keep this person more

engaged if I put in this dancing person

and it just leads to the infinite scroll

and not real connection. So there is no

real economy of the internet anymore.

It's just a bunch of siloed platforms.

Now, people suddenly thought, "Okay, I

really have something." In January 2026,

Open Cloud, which had been available for

quite a few months, suddenly blew up.

And

something weird happened because the

internet wasn't really designed for all

these agents running around. It was

still designed for these closed

platforms.

So, other agents and miners took

advantage of that.

They did what we call prompt injections.

An agent is incredibly naive. It takes

It doesn't do much except take

information in as a prompt. Now,

normally that information is several

pieces. There's a system prompt, there's

context, there's words, but it's very

easy to hijack by putting

convincing this

naive agent that your its principal and

convincing it to take that private data

and send it someplace else.

So, this is what we call, well, Simon

William Willison came up with this term,

the lethal trifecta. So, you have your

computer

with

your private data, your bank account

information, your logins, um

all kinds of spreadsheets, documents,

memos, your notepad, and

your agents have access to that. And

then there's all this content out there

on the internet,

which is basically untrusted. I mean,

you you you see all these websites it's

searching, but it's very hard for an

agent to know that that's a real job

board versus someone has put something

up to fool it. They really don't know.

And then they can take actions. So, they

fill out a form, an email comes in, that

email they read and all of a sudden it

tells them to expose some secret. So,

there's really no way to solve this.

Except, so what did enterprises do? They

basically said, "Okay, we're keeping

our agents within the enterprise. So,

you have your your agents in Slack and

your agents in Salesforce and your

agents in Notion and your agents in all

these different things. Then you have to

do all this work with APIs and MCP

servers to try and integrate all of

these pieces,

but you lose a ton of context. You don't

there's no

you basically have your sales agents and

you have your finance agents and you

have your research agents, but it just

takes a huge amount of work to figure

out how do we get this all together.

This was a problem literally until

today.

And this is

the miracles of synchronicity, but

there's a new law

in the state of West Virginia, but

applicable globally,

that went into effect yesterday.

And about 2 hours before

uh

I'm here, I got I FedExed the documents

and I got this reply from the Secretary

of State saying, "We have registered

your DUNA

with the Secretary of State's office and

you have this organization number

628407.

So, now we have legal standing for an

organization composed of intelligent

agents. And again, there aren't very

many people here. The end of the thing

I'm going to take a picture because this

is historic and it's um it's going to be

cool that we said 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18

20 21 people

um got to experience this moment. So,

what is a Duna?

It's a true internet native agentic

organization. It stands for

decentralized

unincorporated

nonprofit association.

And these organizations can build the

agentic economy.

They're composable

which means well, we know what that

means. You can build agents on top of

other agents. Permissionless.

It's not like Facebook or your bank

where someone can tell you if you're

banned or not banned. You can have an

account or not banned. Anybody can

connect.

They're accountable. They're registered

somewhere. They're safe and they're

secure. So, the things that they're not,

you don't need a board of directors, you

don't need any executives.

There's no corporate shell.

One thing that's important you can be

very profitable, but you can't

distribute profits to members. If you

did that, then the membership units

would be securities. It would be like

selling membership units in an LLC or

selling membership units in a C corp or

selling stock in a C corp. So, there are

plenty of still ways to distribute there

that value. You can't do it based on

ownership. So, what is it? That's what

it's not. It's member governed.

You have full legal standing. You can

own assets and property. So, your agents

can go out and literally

buy an apartment building and market it.

You know, you can design agents in ways

you were never able to do before. Can

enter into agreements. You can raise

capital.

You can earn profits. You can open bank

accounts, hire people, fire them. And

very importantly, this is all blockchain

verified.

Now, this was designed by Andreessen

Horowitz for the blockchain.

And what was really interesting for

DAOs, for crypto projects, but what I

found was that this is even better for

autonomous agents than it is for

blockchains. A lot of people say

blockchains are a solution looking for a

problem. Well, they've finally found the

problem, which is verifying agentic

identity. Because you can't trick the

blockchain. They you know,

when an agent is associated with a

particular account on the blockchain,

you can resolve that account to a whole

process that went from here to here, the

money went from here to here. If someone

sues an agent in court, you can trace it

back to who is responsible for that

agent. So, it just opens up a whole

world of possibility in terms of the

agentic economy.

So, here it is in a really simple way.

We call agents within the agentic

economy allies. So, you have an ally.

And you also have an agentic

organization, which we call a kiduna.

So, it's based on a

duna, and then we added the kinship

because these are all related. So, it's

a kiduna.

Now, your you create your ally

very simply. You inform it, which means

you put a bunch of material into the

vector database. You infuse it with

wisdom. So, it it knows all about what

you want it to know about. Now, it still

has

you know, whatever LLM you want behind

it, but what's really important about

this is the the information that you

give it if you're a scientist or a

programmer or a psychotherapist or a

lawyer,

you can give it all all information that

you have. Then you instruct it. That's

basically setting up the system prompt,

giving it its character, its stance,

knowing who he is, who it is, she is,

how they

interact with the world. Then you

empower it. You connect up all your

accounts, your enterprise accounts, your

uh Slack, your Telegram, your Twitter.

Um then you set up in enact is giving it

specific abilities and automation. So,

you can do very deep agents, long-term

goals that it works for extended periods

of time. And finally, alignment. Really

giving it a purpose

so that

your ally in different contexts works

for you in the way that you want it to.

Then your organizations get really cool

cuz you're building software, but you're

building your company, your organization

literally as software. It's not

Okay, I have software and then I have

all these people and all the people have

to sign paperwork. This is really

designing the entire organization as

software. So, it can discover new

customers, share value. When you have

profits, when you have revenue, you can

reinvest it. It just all works in a

completely new way.

So, then the agentic economy is just

connecting all these allies and

organizations in all these new

completely flexible ways. And

this

this whole capability did not exist

until yesterday. And today we have the

first actual uh

agentic uh organizations.

So, resolving the lethal trifecta. What

happens? The

The lethal trifecta was private data

going meeting untrusted content and then

taking actions on that content, which

can then reveal your private data and

cause all kinds of chaos.

So, here

these

agents at a deep level establish

identity, authority, and boundaries

within an organization, between

organizations. How do we do that? With

cryptographic tokens. So, we just use

JWT, extremely simple, the whole web

runs on JWT tokens. And they just do

that very quickly so that they know

who where it all goes up. So, ultimately

at the top level, what organization is

registered? And this becomes a lot like

the domain name system. So, all of a

sudden, the Secretary of State of West

Virginia is like, I can

and saying, okay, you can resolve it to

uh Kaiser Permanente or Disney or Pepsi.

You know, not some fentanyl dealer from

North Korea. However, you know, they

can't fool each other because they're

resolving these tokens that are

ultimately registered with an authority.

And you can you can look up by name and

say, okay, organization ID. Well, if I

go to that organization, it's got it'll

have an audit trail on the blockchain

all the way down to this action that was

taken here.

So, governance in the agentic economy is

extremely important.

Because every organization really is

always focused on two different things,

and both of those things are extremely

important. One of that of those things

is sustainability, growth,

its own viability as an organization,

but it the other is what's its mission?

And these organizations might have

hundreds, thousands of people,

eventually millions of people. And so,

we use a technology called decision

markets, which is very much like

prediction markets, like polymarket.

Yet, instead so they trade pass and fail

tokens on policies. Any member can

propose a policy.

What's really interesting is, instead of

saying, um

"Well, I'm persuaded. I'm going to vote

for this." It's not votes. They actually

trade pass and fail tokens. So, LLMs are

always goal-oriented. They want rewards.

They want to win. And you actually get

better decisions if they're not just

convincing each other, but ultimately

they're they're

you get more value. Your tokens are

worth more if you side with the winning

group. So, they sort of see them going

back and forth and what the value of the

tokens are.

So, it's and apparently, all this

science says you reach much better

decisions this way. By infusing the

agents with your purpose, with your

values, with your experiences, with your

aspirations, and then let them argue

instead of, you know, someone convincing

you of something.

So, we're right now

in this wonderful

back small communities who are getting

together for purposes, and we can now

build this agentic economy together.

Nobody can say how to do it. It's really

up to us. Build your agents, build your

organizations.

So, now, just like my friend Matthew

Pahr gave me this little scrap of paper

uh way back in November 1993 at my

roommate Van's wedding, I'm saying,

"Here's your invitation to join us." And

um

you know, let's let's blow this whole

thing up. Let's uh really make it work.

So, it's [REDACTED:email_address].

You can reach me.

LinkedIn, um it's {slash} motodave.

Um I probably haven't updated my

LinkedIn in 5 or 6 years. But, um

if you go to kaduna.club, you can sign

up for early access. And in just a few

weeks, you'll be the very very first

people

who will be building this first um

uh this first Kaduna, as it's called, is

for builders. It's very specifically for

builders. We have templates, all kinds

of different agentic templates um to

say, you know, I'm going to build my

sales agents, I'm going to build my

uh social media agents, I'm going to

build my lawyer agents. And we really

want a whole bunch of different people

in there contributing to this cuz then

you can spin out your own organization

for all kinds of purposes.

Um I purposefully went through this

fairly quickly so that I could take a

couple questions if anyone

if anyone has them.

Yes.

Can you just stand up and yell a little

loud?

Okay, I'm going to One more time.

Mhm.

Yes. So, the idea is the reason we I set

up this first very broad um

uh organization is because anybody can

just register it. You can just say, my

agent is part of an organization, and

it'll trace to it. So, you don't have to

set up your own organization. The first

one is just a big umbrella organization.

So, that kind of So, it's the idea of

now in the open internet, anybody can

just get a code. So, these are just JWT

tokens. I can put it on my website. I

can put it here. I can say if you want

to interact with my agent on Slack or

wherever,

people will just at at a certain point

we're going to have to get the message

out, but it's sort of like email at the

beginning. You know, people had to know

that SMTP, like people were on all kinds

of different mail systems. At some point

they agreed, "Okay, we're going to use

SMTP." Everyone was, you know, using

different FTP servers and some people

were using different ways to do file and

everyone sort of agreed at some point on

HTTP. So, my hope is that I mean,

someone's got to do it and it makes more

sense for

a state, a secretary of state, which has

standing in a public office to be that

registry rather than trying to get all

these different companies together and

say, "Here's how to do it."

Yes, it each um

we're just at the end of this, so let's

talk out out front, but basically the

idea is you can create all kinds of

different tokens for different purposes

and you can set different times to live.

You can say what it has access to. You

can give it access to different things.

The idea is just it's more the standard

and you set a series of claims and it

says it gives a blockchain address. It

gives all the information you need so it

can look up and validate before you say,

"Okay, now we're starting to work

together."

Okay?

So, thanks so much and uh if anyone

appreciate it. I guess I'll let me do

this uh picture.

Um

uh so we can

see all the people.

All right.

You're all going to be famous someday.

Thanks.

>> [music]