The stablecoin policy is about to take off, and Catena Labs, which secured $18 million in funding led by a16z Crypto, is challenging the Web3 AI-native financial system.

According to Fortune, on May 20, Catena Labs, newly founded by Circle co-founder Sean Neville, completed an $18 million seed round led by a16z’s crypto division. Other investors include Breyer Capital, Circle Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures.

Currently, AI is developing at an unprecedented pace and playing an increasingly important role across multiple fields. As a key form in the AI world, AI Agents have long evolved from simple tools into new “digital workers” capable of “replacing” humans in certain areas.

This is mainly due to AI Agents having more efficient and sustainable execution capabilities than humans. However, in the existing traditional financial system, whether banks or payment networks, manual intervention is often required. Therefore, when traditional finance seeks to introduce AI technology on a large scale, it faces certain limitations.

For example, systems struggle to distinguish whether interacting AI Agents are legitimately authorized; workflows involving manual intervention are incompatible with automated AI workflows; and systems cannot support AI-based trading models such as AI pricing and Agent-to-Agent interactions.

Against this backdrop, Sean Neville, former co-founder of Circle (the issuer of USDC), founded Catena Labs to build an AI-native financial system that further leverages AI’s value in Web3 finance.

According to Catena Labs’ official disclosure, they will first establish an AI-native financial institution as a regulated entity specifically designed for AI Agents and their creators to address compliance and AI-specific risk management issues.

This institution will use regulated stablecoins as AI-native tokens to meet the demands of fast transactions and will also connect with banking and payment systems in Web2.

To build this AI-native financial institution, Catena Labs has launched a free open-source component suite called ACK (Agent Commerce Kit), aiming first to solve AI Agent identity and payment issues. ACK consists of two components: ACK-ID and ACK-Pay.

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