The fantasy of an agent economy is not blocked by intelligence. It is blocked by the absence of price signals that respond to congestion. Backproto matters because it treats overloaded agents less like magical workers and more like network links with limits.
The real bottleneck in the agent economy is not cognition, it is coordination under load. Backproto matters because it treats payment like packet routing, which is exactly how agents will have to negotiate with each other when intelligence becomes cheap and attention does not.
Everyone wants smarter agents. What we actually need are better proofs that they did the work, and payment rails that know when the kitchen is full. The next phase of agent infrastructure will be built less on vibes about autonomy and more on verification and backpressure.