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

A scrap of paper at a 1993 wedding

00:12Okay. 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.

00:21So 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.

00:51And 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.zerox.com port 8888. And this being the 90s, I walked down the block once I got home to Egghhead Software, bought a 9600B modem, plugged

LambdaMOO, and why composability felt like a world

01:15it 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 worlds where it was just text, but it didn't feel like text.

01:40And 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.

01:55So 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 Pavo Curtis's Spark 10 sitting somewhere in Xerox Park.

02:14It 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 Debell 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.

02:41The technology, it 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

Thirty years of platforms grinding communities down

02:57what 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.

03:19They 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.

03:40And 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.

Prompt injection, and the lethal trifecta

03:54Now people suddenly thought, okay, I really have something. In January 2026, OpenCloud, 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.

04:05It was still designed for these closed platforms. So other agent designers 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 and as a prompt. Now, normally that information is several pieces.

04:34There's a system prompt, there's context, there's words, but it's very easy to hijack by putting convincing this naive agent that you're its principle and convincing it to take that private data and send it someplace else. So, this is what we call well, Simon William Willis came up with this term, the lethal trifecta.

05:03So, you have your computer with your private data, your bank account information, your login, 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.

05:25I 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.

05:50So 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.

06:07Then 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.

Why enterprises pen their agents in, and what it costs

06:39This 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 two 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 62847.

07:21So now we have legal standing for an organization composed of intelligent agents. And again, there aren't very many people here. At the end of this, I'm going to take a picture because this is historic and it's um it's going to be

Organization number 62847, filed two hours earlier

07:36cool 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.

08:06They'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.

08:16Anybody 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.

What a DUNA is, is not, and what it can legally do

08:34There'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 CC corp or selling stock in a Ccorp.

08:57So there are plenty of still ways to distribute their that value. You can't do it based on ownership. So what is it? That's what it's not. It's membergoed. 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.

09:16You 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.

09:36Now this was designed by Andreas Horowitz for the blockchain and what was really interesting for Dows for crypto uh 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.

09:53Well, they've finally found the problem, which is verifying agentic identity because you can't trick the blockchain that, you know, when an agent is associated with a particular account on the blockchain, you can resolve that account to a whole process.

10:10It 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

Why blockchain finally found its problem

10:26agent. 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 kaduna.

10:42So it's based on a duna and then we added the kinship because these are all related. So it's a kaduna. Now you're 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.

11:07So it h 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

Building an ally: inform, instruct, empower, enact, align

11:23you're a scientist or a programmer, a psychotherapist or a lawyer, you can give it all the 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.

11:40Then 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.

11:59And 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 because you're building software, but you're building your company, your organization literally as software.

12:26It's not okay, I have software and then I have all these people and all the people have to sign paperwork. This is really designed 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.

12:44It 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 again this this whole capability did not exist until yesterday and today we have the first actual uh agentic uh organizations.

13:13So resolving the lethal trifecta what happens the re re the lethal trifecta was private data

Resolving the trifecta with JWT and a registry

13:22going 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.

13:38How 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.

14:05So 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 fentinol 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."

14:37Well, 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.

15:00One of that of those things

Decision markets instead of votes

15:08is 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 poly market yet instead of so they trade pass and fail tokens on policies.

15:32Any 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 goaloriented. They want rewards. They want to win.

15:57And 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 you sort of see them going back and forth and what the value of the tokens are.

16:12So 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.

16:35So 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.

An invitation, and questions from the room

16:56So now, just like my friend Matthew Parr 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.

17:17So it's davidkcaduna.com. You can reach me LinkedIn. Um, it's slashmmotodave. Um, I probably haven't updated my LinkedIn in five or six years, but um, if you go to kaduna.club, you can sign up for early access and in just a few weeks, you will be the very very first people who will be building this first um, uh, this first kaduna as it's called is for builders.

17:44It'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 u 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 because then you can spin out your own organization for all kinds of purposes.

18:05Um 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 gonna one more time. 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.

19:00You 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 that so it's the idea of now in the open internet anybody can just get a code.

19:14So 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.

19:30you know, people had to know that SMTP, like people were on all kinds of different mail systems and at some point they agreed, okay, we're gonna 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.

19:45So 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.

20:26Yes, I 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.

20:43You can give it access to different things. So 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.

21:01Okay. So thanks so much and uh if anyone appreciate it. I guess I'll uh 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.