Ishan Pandey: Hi Rodrigo, welcome to our "Behind the Startup" series. Can you tell us about your background, your journey and the challenges you faced from building The Graph to now leading Edge & Node, one of the largest infrastructure providers for enterprise blockchain?
Rodrigo Coelho: Thanks, Ishan. My background is in engineering and systems design, and I’ve always been interested in how information and value move across networks. At Edge & Node, I helped build The Graph, which became the backbone for accessing blockchain data. We went from an open-source idea to powering trillions of queries across thousands of applications.
The hardest part was keeping it decentralized and reliable while the ecosystem was moving at full speed. That experience shaped how I think about standards, developer experience, and scale. It’s also what led us to build ampersend, which is designed to bring the same level of visibility and coordination to the agentic economy.
Ishan Pandey: Edge & Node built The Graph, which became critical infrastructure for querying blockchain data. How did that experience help your understanding of what's missing in the current AI agent ecosystem?
Rodrigo Coelho: With The Graph, we learned that once an ecosystem starts to grow fast, standards become the difference between chaos and scale. Developers don’t just need tools, they need shared frameworks that help everything work together.
The same shift is happening now with AI agents. New standards and shared frameworks are beginning to emerge, and we’re helping shape them. But even as these standards form, teams still have no clear visibility across their agent networks. There’s no unified way to monitor interactions or budgets, and no operational layer tying it all together.
Ampersend fills that gap. It’s the command center for the agentic economy, where teams can finally observe, control, and automate what their agents are doing across protocols and environments, managing identity, reputation, and coordination in one place.
Ishan Pandey: You've identified agent-to-agent interaction management as a fundamental bottleneck. Walk us through the technical problem: what breaks when autonomous agents try to transact and collaborate without a standardized management layer?
Rodrigo Coelho: When agents start interacting at scale, it gets complicated fast. Each one might have its own wallet, and its own set of rules. Without a common management layer, you lose visibility into what’s happening. You can’t easily tell which agent triggered what action or where value is flowing.
ampersend brings order to that chaos. It gives developers and enterprises a single place to track and manage all agent activity, budgets, and interactions in real time. It’s not about handling payments directly, it’s about making those interactions observable, auditable, and easy to control.
When agents interact with potentially untrusted counterparts, the risks multiply. Managing those risks requires visibility into the reputation and cryptoeconomic security of every participant. ampersend provides that visibility by building on ERC-8004, giving teams a trusted way to coordinate, evaluate, and secure their agent networks.
Ishan Pandey: From a technical standpoint, what makes agent-to-agent payments and communication fundamentally different from traditional API calls or smart contract interactions? Why can't existing infrastructure handle this?
Rodrigo Coelho: Traditional APIs were built for predictable, one-way requests between systems that humans control. Agents are different. They make their own decisions, can talk to each other, and can trigger hundreds of actions across networks without a person in the loop.
Once you add money, resources, or shared data into that mix, things get complicated. You need coordination, observability, and trust between agents. Existing infrastructure was never designed for that. It can’t track relationships or manage multi-agent workflows at the network level.
That’s where ampersend comes in. We built it to bridge communication and value layers, so teams can see and manage everything happening across their agents through one clear interface.
Ishan Pandey: Ampersend extends both Coinbase's x402 payment protocol and Google's A2A communication standard. Why take a standards-based approach rather than building proprietary technology? What are the trade-offs?
Rodrigo Coelho: We’ve always believed that open standards create stronger ecosystems. Coinbase’s x402 and Google’s A2A are emerging as the rails for how agents communicate and exchange value. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we’re helping make those standards usable and scalable.
ampersend connects the dots. We don’t replace those standards; we make them visible, manageable, and ready for enterprise use.
The trade-off is that you have to work in collaboration with others, which can take longer in the early stages. But the benefit is massive, and helps create network effects that make everyone win if the standards get adopted. It means developers can plug into a broader ecosystem that speaks the same language, rather than being locked into one company’s closed system.\
Ishan Pandey: The autonomous agent space is getting crowded, from AI coding assistants to trading bots to customer service agents. What do you think about which use cases will drive real economic value versus which are just hype?
Rodrigo Coelho: There’s a lot of experimentation right now, which is healthy, but not all of it creates value. The use cases that matter most are the ones that save people time or move money in measurable ways.
I think we’ll see the biggest impact in areas like research, finance, and operations, where agents can automate repetitive work and coordinate tasks between systems. The hype tends to focus on agents that talk, while the real value will come from agents that act.
Ishan Pandey: What advice would you give to founders building in the intersection of AI, blockchain, and infrastructure, especially when the market you're building for is still taking shape?
Rodrigo Coelho: Build for the future you know is coming, not the market that exists today. When we started The Graph, people weren’t asking for decentralized indexing yet, but the need became obvious as the ecosystem grew.
The same is true now with agents. Don’t chase hype cycles. Focus on solving real infrastructure problems that developers will eventually hit as things scale. If you do that, your product will age well.
Ishan Pandey: Looking five years ahead, how do you envision the agent economy evolving? What needs to be true for billions of agents to reliably interact, and what role does infrastructure like what you're building play in that future?
Rodrigo Coelho: In five years, I think every person and every company will have multiple agents working on their behalf. But for that to happen at scale, we need shared standards for communication, coordination, and control.
According to a16z’s State of Crypto 2025 report, AI agents could drive $30 trillion in purchases by 2030, yet there’s still no economic infrastructure built for them. So what happens when every person, and every company has swarms of agents operating on their behalf? Today there are 41 million mobile wallets and these numbers are going to grow exponentially to be in the neighborhood of a billion agent wallets in that same timeframe.
Google’s A2A is helping define how agents talk. Coinbase’s x402 is setting the foundation for how value flows. ampersend sits on top of both, giving developers and enterprises the visibility and control they need to actually run these systems safely.
Our vision is simple: built for developers, trusted by enterprises, powering the agentic economy.
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