Anthropic 1,000x Revenue in 3 Years, Google Universal Commerce Protocol, a16z $15B AI+Crypto Fund

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:00

   Good morning Legion. This weekend we have more Legion IRL events for in fact in Ibadan, one outside of Lagos, Nigeria, one in Frankfurt and one in Bali. It's a great time to be in the NEAR ecosystem. It's an even better time to be in the near Legion.

2. 0:15

   join us IRL, get to know the Legionnaires in your community and prepare for a great year ahead for the entire ecosystem. Our first story today is all about Anthropic’s phenomenal growth in recent years. From the profile that CNBC ran on anthropic recently, we can see that Anthropic revenue has grown 10x annually for three straight years.

3. 0:36

   Their business customer base has grown from under a thousand to more than 300,000 in 2 years, and Anthropic’s revenue is 85% sourced from business, while OpenAI is more than 60% consumer focused. Next up, for those of you aware of x402 as Coinbase's initiative to pioneer agentic payments. There's now a new player in town.

4. 0:56

   Google proposes the Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP. Payments coming in the Gemini app. This is exactly what Sundar has suggested. He writes: AI agents will be a big part of how we shop in the not so distant future. To help lay the groundwork, we partner with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart to create the Universal Commerce Protocol, a new open standard for agents and systems to talk to each other across every step of the shopping journey.

5. 1:23

   And coming soon, UCP will power native checkout so you can directly buy on AI mode through the Gemini app. 2026 is definitely off to a fast start, especially for those who forecasted a pick up agentic commerce. Last but not least, A16z recently announced that they see AI and crypto as a sector of special interest in their new investment strategy.

6. 1:46

   With a $15 billion focus on these two industries alone. Most directly, crypto is positioned as the coordination and verification layer of the $30 trillion plus agentic economy. Now, can AI and crypto work together to deliver on this promise?

7. 2:02

   And how soon do we expect to see the emergence of AI and crypto payment rails? It certainly seems to be a big focus going into 2026. For those of you wondering about NEAR and how NEAR fits into this, NEAR is at the very center of this vision by pioneering user owned AI run on chain and NEAR Intents fits in there as a universal liquidity layer for agents and agentic commerce. That's all for today. We'll do this again real soon.