Oil, War, and Robot Shoppers

I spent twenty minutes this morning staring at a chart of the 10-Year Treasury yield while my tea went cold. My wife asked what I was doing. I said, “Watching something terrifying become oddly encouraging.”

She said, “That’s how I feel about your cooking.”

Fair enough. She’s not wrong about either. With the Middle East conflict now in its third week and oil prices doing their best impression of a bottle rocket, everything looks grim on the surface. And yet — underneath that mess — there’s a pattern forming that could push markets (especially crypto) meaningfully higher in the near term.

Separately, the robots are shopping. Seriously. Let me explain both.

📈 The Uglier It Gets, The More Likely the Rescue

Bond yields are about to force someone’s hand — and that someone is probably the Fed or the Treasury.

Think of the 10-Year Treasury yield like a pressure gauge on the economy. When it rises, borrowing gets more expensive — mortgages, business loans, all of it. Before the Iran conflict kicked off, that gauge was actually dropping. Investors were nervous about problems in private credit and piling into bonds for safety.

Then the war started, and the gauge reversed course. Hard. Investors started selling bonds, pricing in higher inflation and the prospect of the US needing to borrow heavily to finance the conflict. Now that yield is sitting right on the edge of a major breakout — which, translated from chart-speak, means interest rates across the economy could spike.

The economy can’t absorb that. The markets can’t absorb that. Which means somebody — the Treasury, the Fed, possibly both — will need to step in with some form of relief. Rate intervention. Stimulus. Diplomatic arm-twisting. Something.

And “something” tends to be bullish for risk assets. Crypto appears to be pricing this in already, which is why it’s been holding up better than stocks.

Is there a catch? Of course there is. There’s always a catch.

⛽ 20 Days of Breathing Room

The International Energy Agency released 400 million barrels of oil — and it buys us roughly 20 days.

Before the Strait of Hormuz closure, about 20 million barrels of oil per day were flowing through it. So 400 million barrels sounds enormous until you do the math.

Subtract the 12–13 days of disruption that have already passed, and you’re looking at a very thin cushion. Meanwhile, both sides keep hitting each other’s energy infrastructure, which means even when this stops, the supply damage lingers for months — possibly years.



And here’s a detail that’s not getting enough attention: China gets 13% of its oil from Iran. Chinese fighter jets have quietly stopped flying over Taiwan. The most favourable months for a Taiwan invasion? April, May, and August. April is weeks away. US and allied strategic oil reserves would be depleted. Weapon stocks would be low. If you were playing a very long chess game, this is the move you’d make while your opponent was distracted.

Could be nothing. Could be everything. Worth watching.

🤖 Meanwhile, the Robots Have Learned to Shop

AI agents are starting to spend money on blockchains — and the infrastructure race to support them is heating up fast.

Agentic AI — meaning AI that doesn’t just draft your email but actually reads, replies, and sends it — is quickly becoming a spending force on the internet. The logic for putting that spending on crypto rails is straightforward: nobody in their right mind is handing an autonomous piece of software their Barclays debit card details. Blockchains let you programme spending rules at the contract level. Think of it as giving your AI assistant a prepaid card with very specific instructions tattooed on the back.



Last week, Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong and Binance’s CZ both said they expect AI agents to outnumber humans in making transactions soon. When the two biggest exchange bosses agree on something publicly, it’s worth noting.

The infrastructure is already being built:

• Coinbase/Base launched “Agentic Wallets” built on the x402 payment protocol — letting agents make micropayments to websites and APIs without accounts or middlemen.
• BNB Chain deployed the ERC-8004 standard, a registry system that verifies the identity and reputation of AI agents before they transact. Some reports say BNB Chain has already passed Base and Ethereum in hosting these agents.
• Kraken released a command-line tool that lets AI agents trade on spot, futures, and staking — around the clock, no human confirmation needed. It even has a built-in MCP server for coding tools like Claude Code.
• Solana hosts 9,000+ agents with tooling like SendAI Kit, while Abstract is focused on agent-powered consumer apps and gaming.

On Base alone, Virtuals Protocol reports over 15,800 AI projects, 23,500 active wallets, and nearly $480 million in agent-generated economic output. That’s not a forecast. That’s now.

So what does a world look like where most internet spending is done by software? Honestly, I’m not sure any of us fully know. But the plumbing is being laid at speed, and the chains that get the agent experience right will likely capture an outsized share of that future economy.

So here’s where we stand. Geopolitics is ugly, oil is scarce, and bond yields are threatening to blow a hole in the economy — all of which, perversely, makes some form of rescue more likely. In the nearer term, that’s bullish. In the longer term, it depends on whether the world can resolve (or at least contain) the mess in the Middle East before strategic reserves run dry and other actors start making moves.

Meanwhile, the agentic economy is being built in plain sight. The chains and protocols positioning themselves as the financial rails for AI agents are making bets that could define the next decade of crypto. It’s a bit like watching someone lay railway track in the 1840s — unglamorous work that eventually connects everything to everything else.

The question I keep coming back to: if robots end up doing most of the buying and selling on the internet, what exactly are the rest of us supposed to do? Answers on a postcard, please.