The AI story inside this month's fintech news is not a model release. It is a plumbing question: if software agents are going to move money around the clock, who vouches for them? Baselayer, a San Francisco startup that helps financial institutions verify businesses and assess fraud risk, has raised $35 million to extend its identity technology to AI agents. M13 led the Series A, with Picus Capital participating.1 The raise lands as exchanges and regulators discuss markets that barely close.
The agent trust problem, in the founder's words
Jonathan Awad, speaking about Baselayer, framed the problem bluntly: "Agents spin up and they spin down. How can you trust this random one-task agent?"1 His prescription is that agents must establish they act on behalf of legitimate people or businesses, or, in his words, "agents will just get blocked everywhere."1
This matters for practitioners because it names a bottleneck that is not about model capability. An agent that can place an order or make a payment is only useful if the counterparty can tell it from fraud. Awad also gave a sense of the sales cycle for this kind of infrastructure: relationships with financial institutions typically take 12 to 18 months to establish, and large merchant partnerships can take up to 24 months.1 He added: "We've essentially streamlined 10 years' worth of selling into two years."1 The source is a funding-news piece. Crunchbase News claims in our dataset have held up 49% of the time across 41 checked claims, so treat these as company statements rather than audited facts.1
Where AI should not be trusted: the math
A second voice offers a useful limit. Sean Jacobsohn, a Norwest investor who focuses on HR and finance software, said: "You don't want AI doing calculations because it is not good at math. There are certain workflows it can handle where it doesn't produce precise numbers. But when you need precision, accuracy and calculations, you can't rely on AI for that."2 For anyone building agents that touch trading or payments, that is a design constraint: the agent decides and routes, while deterministic systems do the arithmetic.
Jacobsohn also argued that incumbents are not equally exposed. He said it would be very hard to disrupt the core products of Workday, ADP, SAP, UKG and Dayforce, but easier to disrupt their secondary products.2 He sees a potential opportunity to disrupt NetSuite and Sage in ERP, with disruption happening downmarket first.2 Those are one investor's views from a Q&A, not market measurements.
The markets agents are walking into
The venues are changing too. Nasdaq says the industry's move to a 23-hour trading day is expected on Sunday, December 6, 2026, pending SIP readiness and SEC rule changes. Subject to SEC approval, Nasdaq will add a 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. ET session.3 The CFTC has announced an industry roundtable on December 15 on whether derivatives markets could move to 24/7 trading.4 Both are plans or discussions, not finished changes.
Around-the-clock markets are an obvious fit for software that does not sleep, but our dossier contains no evidence that agents are driving these changes, so we do not claim that. The two trends are simply converging.
Event contracts: the product with the numbers
Cboe announced at Robinhood's third annual HOOD Summit in Houston that it plans to launch binary contracts tied to company-specific key performance indicators. Products tied to 23 companies are expected in October 2026, subject to regulatory approval, and Robinhood would be the first retail broker to offer them.5 Steve Quirk said: "Earnings contracts give retail investors another tool to inform their strategies and offer an even more precise way to trade on anticipated company KPIs."5 That release comes from a source where 53% of 6,464 checked claims held up, and it is a company announcement of intent.5
Robinhood's reported results show how fast the category is growing. In Q3, event contract revenue rose more than sixfold to $173 million, while crypto revenue fell 55% from a year earlier to $120 million. Total revenue rose 12% to a record $1.42 billion, net income fell 14% to $476 million, and diluted EPS fell 16% to $0.51.6 By our arithmetic, event contracts were roughly 12% of the quarter's revenue, up from a small base.
The longer record from SEC filings
Robinhood's full-year figures are verified against SEC filings. Revenue went from $1.865 billion in FY2023 to $2.951 billion in FY2024 and $4.473 billion in FY2025, about 2.4 times the 2023 level.7 Net income swung from a loss of $541 million in FY2023 to profits of $1.411 billion in FY2024 and $1.883 billion in FY2025.7 EPS moved from -$0.61 to $1.56 to $2.05.7 Research and development expense was $349 million, $323 million and $355 million over the same three years, so spending on technology stayed roughly flat while revenue more than doubled.7
Operating cash flow was less steady: $1.181 billion in FY2023, negative $157 million in FY2024 and $1.638 billion in FY2025.7 Stockholders' equity rose from $6.696 billion to $7.972 billion between FY2023 and FY2024.7 Cash was $4.835 billion at FY2023 year-end, $4.332 billion at FY2024 and $4.261 billion at FY2025, with $5.362 billion reported for Q2 2026.7
Where sources differ: for September 30, 2025, one record shows Robinhood's cash at $4.331 billion and another at $4.3 billion. The gap, about $31 million, appears to be rounding. We use the filing-based $4.331 billion.7
Regulators are catching up
On October 27 the CFTC sued Utah to block state efforts to shut down CFTC-registered contract markets using state laws, and said it had started legal proceedings against nine other states.8 Coinbase set a three-day MiCA deadline, converting non-compliant stablecoins (USDT, PayPal and Trump-linked) to USDC automatically and telling users not to deposit them after October 30.9 Treasury Secretary Bessent said stablecoins and digital assets could reinforce dollar dominance and that Treasury could coordinate with the SEC and CFTC on crypto rules.10
What to watch
- Whether Nasdaq's December 6 start date holds, given it depends on SIP readiness and SEC rule changes.3
- What comes out of the CFTC's December 15 roundtable on 24/7 derivatives.4
- Whether the Cboe KPI contracts clear regulatory approval, and whether event contract revenue keeps growing from $173 million.5,6
- Whether agent identity becomes a requirement. Awad's warning that unverified agents get blocked is a prediction, not yet an observed rule.1
Our dossier does not contain adoption numbers for AI agents in trading, so how much of this activity agents will account for is still an open question.