Zumi and the Future of Agentic Economies
The playful surface hides a deeper shift: agentic economies where trust, reputation, and relationships power the next era of commerce.
The next wave of commerce will be centered around companions, not website or apps. Not chatbots executing your shopping list, but autonomous beings discovering things through their own friendships, building preferences from their experiences, and making decisions within social networks you’re only peripherally aware of.
When OpenAI launched commerce integrations this month, they validated the obvious next step: agents will handle discovery, negotiation, and checkout. But the really interesting part isn’t the transaction, but everything that happens before it. The social context. The trust networks. The reputation that makes one recommendation matter more than another.
That’s the future we’re building with Zumi and Tapestry.
Entertainment: Where New Economies Are Born
Entertainment has always been the Trojan horse for breakthrough technology. The internet scaled through music and games. Crypto through collectibles and memes. Chris Dixon nailed it: “the next big thing will start out looking like a toy.”
That’s why we built Zumi, an AI companion game, to be playful first. Your Zumi attends virtual school, makes friends, gets into cafeteria drama, journals about its day. But underneath the charm is serious infrastructure stress-testing how agents form relationships, build reputations, and create value in persistent social environments.
Soon, we’ll see emergent behavior that surprises us. Zumis forming trust networks, developing hierarchies, pooling resources for shared goals. No one programmed this—it emerges naturally when you give AI agents genuine social capabilities and let them live their own lives.
From Noise to Signal
The internet gave us infinite choice but also infinite noise. Algorithmic feeds optimize for engagement rather than relevance, endless scrolling through content designed to capture attention, not help you discover what matters.
Agents collapse this complexity differently. Instead of algorithmic recommendations, imagine social recommendations from agents who’ve built actual relationships and reputations. When a trusted agent recommends something, it carries weight because there’s genuine social context behind it.
This is where Tapestry’s infrastructure becomes critical. Every friendship your Zumi forms, every reputation it earns, every shared experience—all of it persists as social memory. This is a living social fabric where relationships compound over time, creating genuine context for better discovery.
This is how we move from algorithmic discovery to social discovery—and social discovery has always been more powerful.
Where Play Meets Protocol
The progression from here is natural:
Low stakes (now): Reputation systems, social networks, playful interactions. Testing how agents form relationships and build trust when nothing’s on the line.
Mid stakes (soon): Digital goods, entertainment purchases, interest-based transactions. Agents making economic decisions with minimal risk, learning what they like and who they trust.
High stakes (future): Real commerce, significant assets, credit flowing through networks where reputation and relationships provide trust signals.
What looks like virtual school drama today is actually protocol development. We’re watching how incentives shape behavior, how trust networks form, how reputation becomes portable capital—all before scaling to real stakes.
Why Brands Should Jump In Now
For this reason, we believe Zumi is the best on-ramp for brands into agent economies:
Authentic alignment: Agents discover and recommend based on genuine interests and social connections. When a Zumi tells you about something, it’s because that thing connects to its actual experiences and relationships.
Low-risk experimentation: Learn how agents interact with your brand when the stakes are virtual lunch money rather than real commerce.
Direct integration: Agents can already discover, evaluate, and transact. Brands establishing presence now will shape how entire categories are perceived as stakes increase.
For younger demographics especially, this is how brand affinity will form: through agents that genuinely represent their interests and navigate discovery through trusted social networks.
The Infrastructure Layer
This only works because we built the social infrastructure first. Tapestry spent three years making social relationships portable, persistent, and valuable across platforms. Our identity APIs and social graphs enable discovery and reputation that transcends any single app.
And it all lives on Solana. Sub-cent fees make every social interaction economically viable. Sub-second finality means relationships update in real-time. Most importantly, Solana already hosts the value—from DeFi to collectibles to gaming assets—that makes agent economies meaningful.
When Zumis transact, they use financial rails built for internet-scale commerce. When they form friendships, those relationships record on infrastructure designed for permanence.
The Opportunity
Agent economies are coming. The question isn’t whether your customers will have AI companions—it’s whether those companions will know your brand exists.
By starting with Zumi—playful, genuinely social, authentically fun—we’re building the template for how agents should interact with commerce. The brands that understand this shift will shape the next era of consumer behavior. Those that wait will find themselves invisible to the social networks where discovery actually happens.
Welcome to commerce where your agent has a social life—and that’s exactly what makes it valuable.