AI Agents With Aligned Incentives Could Upend the Brokerage…

The agentic finance wave is accelerating — Anthropic, Circle, MoonPay, and Gemini all launched agent-related financial products within weeks of each other — but the underlying incentive structure hasn't moved. Every exchange and brokerage still earns more when customers trade more, regardless of whether those customers win.

The numbers expose the conflict plainly. U.S. market makers paid over $4.9 billion for order flow in 2025, up from $3.8 billion in 2021. Crypto derivatives volume hit $18.6 trillion in Q1 2026, with perpetuals dominating spot. Robinhood once derived more than 75% of its revenue from payment for order flow. Meanwhile, research finds 74–89% of retail traders lose money. The exchange gets paid either way.