A trading agent connects to your brokerage account. Before it places a single order, it reads a hundred premium financial newsletters in under a minute, synthesizes them across themes, and picks two stocks. Total cost: about $10 in stablecoins, split between the writers whose work it just read.

This is the world Michael Blau is building toward, and it is closer than it sounds. He recently launched Drip, a platform that lets writers on Substack, beehiiv, and similar newsletter platforms sell their work to AI agents on a pay-per-read basis. The default price is 10 cents per article. Writers can set their own. Settlement happens in stablecoins. The whole transaction takes seconds.

Blau spent three and a half years on the investment team at a16z Crypto, where he focused on DeFi and NFTs after quitting BlackRock two weeks into his first job out of college. He left a16z about a year ago to join his brother, Justin Blau, founder of Royal and Bond, the platforms exploring on-chain music royalty splits and staking for creators. Royal’s mandate has always been the same: find ways for creators to use programmable money. Drip is the latest expression of it.

The bet is straightforward, even if the timing is bold. AI agents will soon carry wallets. Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex already support plugin wallets that let the model spend on a user’s behalf. OpenAI just shipped a Plaid integration that lets ChatGPT analyze a user’s finances. Once that capability is widespread, every paywalled newsletter becomes a potential vendor and every AI query becomes a potential transaction. The question is who builds the connective tissue.

Now Media founder Matt Medved sat down with Blau for an hour on how Drip works, why he thinks micropayments will outrun the credit-card economy in the agentic age, and what a former venture investor learns when he switches sides.

Matt Medved: Tell us a bit about your background, from a16z Crypto to Royal and now Drip.

Michael Blau: I studied finance and computer science at WashU in St. Louis. When I graduated, I was supposed to work at BlackRock in their portfolio analytics division in San Francisco. I accepted the job, worked there for about two weeks, and quit. Ariana Simpson, a general partner at a16z Crypto, stole me from the clutches of traditional finance.

I was at a16z for about three and a half years on the investment team, focused on DeFi and NFTs. About a year ago, I left to join my brother, Justin, who founded Royal. I came over to lead some new product directions. We’ve been running a lot of experiments. Royal’s mission has always been the same: find ways for creators to use programmable money on the blockchain. Drip is no different.

What is Drip?

Drip is the tool that lets writers, the ones who typically have their content behind a paywall on Substack, beehiiv, or a simple newsletter, sell that content to AI agents on a pay-per-read basis. We’re starting with finance, investing, and tech newsletters.

The way it works today: if you give your agent a wallet, and by that I mean Claude or Codex, where there are 20-plus agentic wallets you can plug in, you can say, “I’d love to learn what the top premium financial writers are saying about a stock today.” Drip goes out, buys those articles on a per-article basis, synthesizes the information for you, and pays the writers what they deserve along the way.

“I’d happily pay 10 bucks for a single article. When x402 brought back the pay-per-use model, it all clicked.”
MICHAEL BLAU

Where did the idea come from?

I was diving deep into x402, MCP, and Tempo. I’m a crypto engineer, so I love to get into the latest tech. One thing I noticed was that a lot of people were wrapping existing APIs and selling per-call access to agents. The thesis behind that is all APIs will eventually be pay-per-use through these protocols, instead of a monthly SaaS fee and an API key.

At the same time, I’m a heavy Substack reader. I don’t want to pay $20 a month to a hundred different writers. Subscription fatigue is real, and it’s expensive. It’s not that I don’t want to support them. I’d happily pay 10 bucks for a single article. When x402 brought back the pay-per-use model, it all clicked. Why don’t we let Substack writers make their stuff available to agents directly?

Two things have been happening for a while. Everyone goes to ChatGPT for research. And in the X tech sphere, everyone has put their content behind a paywall, because the biggest fear after ChatGPT launched was that AI would summarize everyone’s work on the open internet without citing them, without crediting them, and most importantly without paying them. Drip meets in the middle. Let AI access your content, but make sure you get paid for it.

DripStack (@trydrip) lets you ask questions across premium finance newsletters.

Your AI agent can now find the relevant posts, pay only for the articles it reads, and synthesize an answer. No subscription needed.

Powered by x402 @base + @mpp @tempo

👉 https://t.co/GBnHZ3ebne pic.twitter.com/GI6E0ILrx8
— Michael Blau (@blauyourmind) May 13, 2026

Walk us through where Drip is at right now. You showed me writers are already getting paid.

There are two parts. The first is what I described: plug Drip into Claude or Codex with an agentic wallet and start querying. The issue is that’s still pretty hard for most people. Mainstream isn’t using Codex, let alone giving it a crypto wallet. That demand is maybe six months out, maybe sooner.

So we built a second thing: a chat interface on our website with an agent running on our server and a wallet attached. You go to dripstack.xyz, type “what stocks are the top premium financial newsletters looking at today,” and behind the scenes our agent buys the latest articles, synthesizes them, and shows you which articles it purchased, which authors, and how much it paid per article. No wallet setup. Just experience the magic immediately. We sponsor the payments on the demo, so users don’t spend anything to try it.

How have writers and publications reacted? Media operators tend to be skeptical of AI.

The first thing we tell them is that Drip is not meant to replace subscriptions. We are additive. You already own your audience through email. We are a new demand source and a new monetization channel. It’s “and,” not “or.” Keep your subscription business model. Add this. It can even be lead gen, because if a reader keeps surfacing your work through Drip, they may go subscribe to you directly.

The other thing that’s come up is that writers are already experiencing AI consumption without compensation. One writer told me his readers copy-paste his entire newsletter archive into ChatGPT and ask, “given everything this writer has said, what would he say about this new thing?” His writing is being used for their benefit, and he is not getting paid. We built a feature that takes that exact behavior and puts it inside a product: a publication-specific AI skill you paste into Claude or Codex that only references that writer’s articles. Use ours, the writer gets paid.

Had a blast talking to @mattmedved today about what we’re building with @trydrip, and how we’re creating tools that help writers get paid when AI agents use their work.

Check it out 👇 https://t.co/v1O3HWhwPj
— Michael Blau (@blauyourmind) May 21, 2026

Where do you hope pricing lands?

I actually hope writers don’t set crazy prices. Don’t charge $10 an article. Set it between one cent and one dollar. At scale, you might have 10,000 agents querying your work in a day. If you charge $30, no agent running a real analysis will pay that. If you charge a cent, you get a constant stream of micropayments.

The clean example is a trading agent that connects to your Robinhood account. Before it buys a stock, it might want to read a hundred premium newsletters, synthesize them, and pick two names. It is not going to pay $10 an article to do that. It is going to pay pennies.

What needs to be true for this to actually scale?

Two things. First, every ChatGPT and Claude needs a wallet embedded inside it. That’s coming. OpenAI just launched a Plaid integration to analyze your finances. Hooking up a credit card to ChatGPT to spend on your behalf is the obvious next step. That’s the demand side.

Second, writers need to buy in. There is a hockey-stick problem. At small volume, five cents an article does not beat a $20-a-month subscription. But at scale, with thousands of agents pinging daily, five cents per article surpasses $20 a month very quickly. The demand has to come first. Writers will buy in when they see the dollar signs.

“At scale, five cents per article surpasses $20 a month very quickly. Writers will buy in when they see the dollar signs.”
MICHAEL BLAU

Why start with financial and tech newsletters?

The biggest open question in agentic payments is who the demand source is. Right now, the honest answer is nerds in the crypto and AI agentic-commerce sphere on X. That’s it.

But there is another audience willing to push through enormous friction for something they really want, and that’s investors and traders. People are already using AI to generate trading ideas. If you go to ChatGPT and ask what stock to buy, it tells you what it has learned from Reddit and WallStreetBets, and it gives the same answer to most people who ask. If you’re more sophisticated, you want gated, paywalled premium analysis. That’s the wedge.

Why does this need crypto rails instead of credit cards?

People conflate two things online: agentic payments and micropayments. They are not the same. Your agent paying $30 for something on Amazon is fine on a credit card. We’ve all done it. But a credit card cannot spend one cent. Card minimums sit around 50 cents.

We support both rails on Drip. If you pay in stablecoins, the default is 10 cents per article. If you pay through credit card via our Stripe Link integration, we force the minimum to 50 cents because that is what the network can do.

The second reason is what gets me really excited, and I’m not sure how many people are talking about this. If a writer earns money via micropayments and it sits in a stablecoin wallet on a blockchain, you can compose on top of it. I can take their 10 cents, deposit it into a Morpho vault, and earn 4% interest instantly. I can split it across contributors with a smart contract in one click. Traditional banking rails can’t do that. If Drip works and publishers are earning continuously, letting them also earn yield on those balances at the same time is just so much easier to build with stablecoins on chain.

You went from the investment side at a16z to the founder side. What has that transition been like?

I’m learning every day. The biggest challenge is that it’s really hard to think for yourself. The current cycle pulls you in. It is so easy to read what three people say about something and just agree.

Marc Andreessen used to tell us internally that the best investors are not very opinionated about where the space is going. That’s the founder’s job. As an investor, you should be really good at evaluating people. Chris Dixon used to say his worst investments were the ones where he was most opinionated, where his own expertise interfered. His best investments were in industries he had zero expertise in. He just trusted the founder.

The founder role is the opposite. You have to be the opinionated one. You have to walk in with a vision of the future, convince other people of it, and then execute. Those are very different modes of thinking. It’s taken me a minute to switch.

“The best investors aren’t very opinionated about where the space is going. That’s the founder’s job.”
MICHAEL BLAU

There’s a lot happening in agentic commerce. How do you map the categories?

There are three places to play. You can be the wallet, the thing that holds the funds for the agent. That’s complicated. You need spending limits, allowlists, blocklists, because you don’t want your agent burning your money unchecked. A lot of companies are going to build that.

You can sell to agents. That’s where Drip sits. We are a seller. We don’t have a wallet, and I don’t plan to build one. We build the tool that lets merchants come and sell to agents that already have wallets.

The third is discovery. With buyers and sellers everywhere, how do they find each other? It has to be agent-native. Merit Systems has a version. Coinbase launched one. That’s going to be a Google-scale war, because whoever decides which seller surfaces at the top of an agent query is determining the economy. But buyers and sellers have to exist first. Then we can talk about the discovery layer.

What does your own AI agent setup look like these days?

I switched from Claude to Codex about a week ago. The Codex desktop app is a better UX for me. Terminal, browser, file system, all in one window. I used to have three windows open at once. Now it’s one.

My organizing system is a master folder on my computer with subfolders I call “brain folders.” Each project gets one. The Drip brain folder has cold-outreach drafts, website copy, hard interview questions, the logo, everything. When I want to work on Drip, I point Codex at that folder for context. Next weekend I’m wiring it all into Obsidian, which I’ve used religiously for years.

What do you want Now Media readers to know about Drip?

I’d love any and all feedback. If your agent has a wallet, come to dripstack.xyz and go through the flow. If you don’t have a wallet, try the demo. We sponsor those payments, so you don’t spend anything. DM me on X with what works and what doesn’t. Tell me it’s great or it sucks. I want to hear it.

Editor’s note: This interview transcript has been edited for concision and clarity.