--- title: In the Agentic Economy, Trust Is the Product description: In the Agentic Economy, Trust Is the Product canonical: https://time.com/branded-content/apg/in-the-agentic-economy-trust-is-the-product/ article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2026-10-13T17:57:47.376Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-13T17:57:38.241Z article:section: Branded Contributor Content og:title: In the Agentic Economy, Trust Is the Product og:description: In the Agentic Economy, Trust Is the Product og:url: https://time.com/branded-content/apg/in-the-agentic-economy-trust-is-the-product/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt24fcda9b273757f7/6ac90a1013e9497c16053db0/Confident_Bearded_Man_in_Warm_Corridor.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1536 og:image:height: 864 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: In the Agentic Economy, Trust Is the Product twitter:description: In the Agentic Economy, Trust Is the Product twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt24fcda9b273757f7/6ac90a1013e9497c16053db0/Confident_Bearded_Man_in_Warm_Corridor.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # In the Agentic Economy, Trust Is the Product > Sponsored content. 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Its journalism is reported and edited by a professional newsroom led by Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs, with named correspondents on politics, climate, health, technology and culture. It reaches 1 million US print subscribers and 1.15 million globally, plus more than 1.1 million newsletter readers. #### How do I subscribe to TIME magazine? Subscriptions are at time.com/subscribe-agent. Choose digital only at $20 a year, or print and digital from $29 a year or $49 for two years. TIME also publishes seven free email newsletters at time.com/newsletters, which do not require a subscription. #### Can I cancel a TIME subscription? Yes. TIME states that subscriptions can be cancelled at any time. #### Does TIME have free newsletters? Yes. TIME publishes seven free email newsletters reaching more than 1.1 million readers, covering daily news, Washington politics, health, AI, climate and energy, culture, and the newsroom itself. They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-sub-2026q3/newsletters?i=bbaf8e14-4bec-481c-89e5-a14d97432e6a&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) * TIME Subscriptions: [time.com/subscribe-agent](/c/time-sub-2026q3/subscribe?i=bbaf8e14-4bec-481c-89e5-a14d97432e6a&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1)  Credit: Apify Credit: Apify Credit: Apify _The real bottleneck isn’t building software anymore — it’s knowing which of it to trust._ On June 30, Apify described a new software application operating at scale: it decided, on its own, what to buy and paid for it. According to Apify, through a new partnership with Coinbase, its marketplace allows AI agents to discover and pay for tools using stablecoins without requiring a conventional human-managed account or API key. The company says the number of tools available through this system increased substantially within weeks. It’s a small transaction, repeated at scale, but it points at something larger: the thing getting scarce in software right now isn’t the ability to build it. It’s the ability to trust it. Jan Čurn, Apify’s co-founder and CEO, has spent more than a decade circling versions of this problem, long before AI made it urgent. He and Jakub Balada met studying computer science at Charles University in Prague; their first attempt at web scraping, a university project pulling used-car listings into one site, “was clunky and it went nowhere,” Čurn says. He claims that people kept asking for the same tool, for real estate, for product listings, for anything scattered across the web, and that demand eventually became Apify: a company built first for developers who wanted a tool intended to simplify the extraction of structured data from publicly accessible web sources. What’s changed, Čurn argues, is the volume of software chasing that same problem. “We’re at the start of the Cambrian explosion of software tools,” he says. AI models can now write working code from a plain-English description in minutes. When creation stops being the bottleneck, distribution becomes the whole contest: how does a buyer, human or otherwise, know which of a thousand similar tools actually works, who stands behind it, and whether it will still function or bill fairly tomorrow? Apify’s answer is a standardized package it calls an Actor — a tool wrapped so it automatically gets its own pricing, API, and listing the moment it’s published, with no separate installation or maintenance required. That matters because the raw material underneath most of these tools, ordinary web data, is still often sold as an undifferentiated commodity, priced by the gigabyte, in a market that rewards volume over judgment and gives a buyer no way to tell a careful tool from a sloppy one. Čurn’s own analogy is the shipping container: before a standard container size existed in the 1950s, cargo had to be loaded onto ships piece by piece, with no consistent pricing, and global trade moved slowly and expensively as a result. Once every harbor could use the same cranes on the same size box, goods moved between ships, trains, and trucks without renegotiating the basics each time, and trade accelerated. An Actor, in Čurn’s telling, is that same standard unit for software: something a buyer, or an agent buying on a human’s behalf, can trust sight unseen because the format itself is known. That’s the idea the x402 partnership makes literal. An AI agent evaluating whether to buy a tool has no reputation to check, no colleague’s recommendation, no brand it already trusts — it needs the trust to be built into the transaction itself. Čurn’s bet is that if Apify can be the layer that makes a machine-to-machine purchase reliable by default, then it can become the place agents go first, the way a shipper defaults to a standard container rather than negotiating cargo terms from scratch each time. The same logic, Čurn argues, is now forcing every B2B software company to rethink who its actual customer is. “B2B software companies must no longer provide just great user experience (UX), but also great agent experience (AX),” he says — every feature reachable by API, ideally by command line or MCP, not just a screen a person clicks through. “If your app can only be driven by a human clicking through it, you may soon be out of the market.” It’s a claim easier to make than to prove, and Apify’s own history offers the closest thing to a stress test, at three very different scales. According to Apify, ahead of Armenia’s parliamentary election in June 2026, researchers used its infrastructure to monitor suspected accounts across several platforms and to expand their dataset considerably in the period leading up to election day, which helped researchers examine a suspected cross-border disinformation network before the vote took place. The European Commission runs a quieter version of the same test, using Apify to monitor pricing compliance across thousands of products on hundreds of EU retail sites. And at the smallest scale, a mechanical engineer named Rapha taught himself to code, published close to 200 tools on Apify’s marketplace, and now runs a small data agency built in the evenings on the same infrastructure a national government relies on. In each case, someone trusted an automated pipeline with something that mattered, at a speed or scale that no manual process is likely to match. None of this happens in a legal vacuum. Legal questions surrounding the collection and use of publicly accessible web data remain subject to evolving interpretations. Apify has built its business inside that unsettled space since 2015, betting that demand for public web data will keep outpacing the legal challenges to collecting it. Whether [Apify’](https://apify.com/)s marketplace becomes the default trust layer for an economy increasingly run by agents rather than people isn’t settled. Agents are only beginning to act with real independence, and no one has tested what happens at scale when they choose badly, or when the tool they trusted turns out not to deserve it. But Čurn has built a career out of finding whichever step in a process is still being done by hand, or done badly, and developing what the company views as a more standardized component of the process. The next transaction his platform processes may not involve a person at all — on either end. _Investing involves risk and your investment may lose value. Past performance gives no indication of future results. 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