In 2017 I was part of a team building a protocol called Po.et. The idea back then was simple in that if the first path to publish content was on a blockchain there would be a ton of opportunities to leverage that public data in unique ways to better the media ecosystem. Some early ideas for applications were ways to see the provenance of information answering whether or not the source should be trusted. Another was new models by which creators and media companies could make money like transacting on tweets or introducing better forms of content licensing that extend beyond just institutional models. We weren’t alone there were others working towards the same objective like Civil at Consensys. There are many reasons why it didn’t work, in crypto we say we were early, but also the market wasn’t there, the threat wasn’t obvious and it wasn’t important enough to prioritize over the legacy day to day operations at the media companies and platforms.
But we’re in a new world now.

The internet is becoming completely programmable. I worked on the ad side for years and whenever I heard programmable I thought of programmatic and it was just a means by which to use data, target ads and make it as efficient as possible through machines. But now that’s on both sides. You would think we just end up in a hellscape of content everywhere but I’d argue that with this, inventory actually gains dimension. A tweet, a video clip, even AI slop content once serving as pure artifacts of attention are becoming active participants in an economic loop. Tokenized formats, embedded attribution and instant micropayments transform content from a consumable into a financial primitive.

I was listening to Matthew Prince on the USV podcast the other day and he presented an idea similar to one I had as well in that in this new environment we now know through AI the questions we have answered and ones we do not. And that creates a dynamic new marketplace for consumers to move beyond passive and become active in their participation and value contributions to the internet.

Platforms like Cloudflare’s NET Dollar and Coinbase’s x402 Foundation are building some unique rails for this, enabling content objects to transact autonomously. The internet that once priced impressions in fractions of a cent is now engineering a system where those same interactions clear value instantly and on-chain in a bilateral way.

This evolution reframes inventory not as a symptom of the attention economy but as its next infrastructure layer. Content when indexed through open payment standards becomes a programmable endpoint. Each article, image or data feed can host a wallet, route royalties and contribute to an ecosystem of composable media. Instead of being harvested for views, inventory becomes the raw material for algorithmic trade with fragments of cultural value circulating through autonomous agents, APIs and digital wallets. What was once ephemera and for the moment can now be yield bearing.

In this example the underlying logic is industrial not sentimental. The feed is sort of a factory line building a more robust content engine to better inform and insight either machines or humans. Each creative output embedded with metadata and payment rails produces traceable flow. This turns platforms into supply chains for digital labor where attention metrics are replaced by transaction graphs. The economics of contribution emerge from the infrastructure itself not by curating communities but by strengthening the source of information to build the most viable landscape in this next era of seeking. The most scalable form of participation isn’t social, it’s financial.

Cloudflare’s entry into payments signals a broader inversion of the stack, infrastructure providers are becoming financial platforms and the assets flowing through them are no longer websites or apps but could also be microtransactions tied to content units. This collapses the distance between network effect and monetary effect. It also feels to be on the right side of history if you’re in the business of what could be best for the media at large.

The programmable internet doesn’t end the age of inventory. Whereas much of content today has been anchored on social capital and much going off the rails in being a proxy for attention, we can see it become a new atomic unit of value exchange. Not to say it’s binary, it definitely isn’t. But when compensation is tied to positive contributions rather than just the number of followers or likes, it creates a competitive environment around what counts as 'good'.. And in a world where digital objects can own wallets, pay contributors and negotiate usage autonomously the line between media and money dissolves. This has been the biggest issue with microtransactions to date and forever. It’s a mind fuck and too much work for most consumers or creators to think through. These systems hopefully offer a simpler way to see what that can be.

The next cultural economy won’t be built by abandoning inventory but by letting it transact in a way that adheres to convenience and human speed.