Menu #3 - The Web3 Dinner Club

Agentic Payments
Who moved my cheese
Web3 Dinner Club: April (LDN)
Revolut banking
Novel Labs
Brand spice
Chefs Note

Welcome to The Menu, the weekly newsletter for the Web3 Dinner Club.

The weekly dispatch on Web3 in the UK — what founders, investors, and builders are talking about around the table.

This week the theme is simple:

Money is becoming programmable again.

AI agents are starting to act independently on the internet, calling APIs, gathering data, and running workflows. The missing piece has been the payments.

That gap might be closing.

In this issue:

•⁠ ⁠Agentic payments and the rise of x402
•⁠ ⁠A founder lesson from Who Moved My Cheese
•⁠ ⁠Revolut’s new banking licence and what it means
•⁠ ⁠A newsletter worth reading
•⁠ ⁠London’s new member club experiment

Let’s get into it.

Signal, served weekly.

This month’s dinner is proudly sponsored by Novel Labs.

A multi-award-winning London storytelling studio building the brands of the future in AI, blockchain, and emerging technologies.

Best known for the $100m expansion to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, The Mutant Cartel World.

If you’re a startup or scale-up building a brand and looking for real go-to-market impact from those who have repeatedly built unicorns and category kings as VCs and founders... ask for an intro at the table.

We are seeing two separate threads converging into one very practical idea:

In the near future, software will buy things.
Not humans.

That doesn’t mean your AI is ordering trainers on Amazon all day. It means the quiet, constant stuff:

Today’s rails weren’t built for that. Cards assume forms, accounts, approvals, and humans. Subscriptions assume someone is logging in and committing monthly.

Agents don’t work like that.

x402 revives the long-unused HTTP status code “402 Payment Required” and turns it into a simple pattern:

No checkout pages. No accounts. No subscriptions.
Just pay-per-use, at internet speed.

The internet monetised itself through ads and subscriptions.
But agents don’t click ads. And they don’t “subscribe” like humans.

So the emerging third model is machine-to-machine micropayments, software paying software, automatically.

That’s why you’re seeing more talk about “agent economies” and why Stripe/Circle/others are leaning into stablecoin rails for high-frequency, low-value payments.

This could be a genuinely new commerce layer… or it could be the classic tech pattern:

If agents become the buyer, what wins?

Reading list:

Book Review — Who Moved My Cheese?

Every founder eventually experiences the moment when the market changes faster than they do.

Who Moved My Cheese? It is a small book about that exact moment.

The story follows four characters living in a maze searching for cheese, a metaphor for the things we pursue in life: money, success, and opportunity.

Two characters represent human behavior:

•⁠ ⁠Hem, resists change
•⁠ ⁠Haw, adapts

When the cheese disappears, Hem refuses to believe it’s gone.

Haw eventually accepts reality and ventures back into the maze.

The lesson is simple but uncomfortable:

The market never stands still.

For builders in Web3, the message feels familiar.

Narratives change fast.

2017 — ICOs
2020 — DeFi
2021 — NFTs
2023 — RWAs
2024 — AI x crypto

Founders who survive long enough learn the same lesson Haw did:

The cheese will move.

Your only choice is whether you move with it.

The Web3 Dinner Club is a curated, seated dinner that brings together founders, investors, builders, and operators across crypto, blockchain, AI, and adjacent tech. Not for pitches or panels, but for real conversation at one long table.

It’s for people who value signal over noise and want high-quality relationships in the UK scene. Attend if you want thoughtful intros, sharper context on what’s happening locally, and a night that actually turns into follow-ups.

The next dinner is coming up on Thursday, 23rd April.
Schedule: 6:00 pm early meet-up → 7:30 pm seated dinner.
Ticket: £125 (includes three-course dinner + drinks).
Venue: In Mayfair/Soho, announced to ticket holders.

Proudly Sponsored by Novel Labs.

Revolut has quietly become one of the most important fintech companies in Europe.

Nik Storonsky, co-founder:

“The UK is our home market and central to our growth. We look forward to introducing a full suite of banking services to our millions of UK customers, bringing the same innovative experience we already provide across the rest of Europe. This is a vital step in our mission to build the world’s first truly global bank.”

Some numbers:

•⁠ ⁠45+ million customers globally
•⁠ ⁠£15B+ annual revenue run-rate (estimates across products)
•⁠ One of the most widely used fintech apps in the UK and Europe

What started as a travel card has evolved into something closer to a financial super-app.

Today Revolut offers:

•⁠ ⁠banking
•⁠ ⁠stock trading
•⁠ ⁠savings
•⁠ ⁠FX
•⁠ ⁠crypto trading
•⁠ ⁠payments
•⁠ ⁠business accounts

And now it is pushing further into regulated banking infrastructure.

A full banking licence allows Revolut to:

•⁠ ⁠hold customer deposits directly
•⁠ ⁠expand lending products
•⁠ o⁠ffer insured accounts
•⁠ deepen integration into the financial system

The crypto side of the business is particularly interesting.

Revolut already provides:

•⁠ ⁠crypto trading for retail users
•⁠ ⁠custody through its platform
•⁠ ⁠access to dozens of digital assets

The company has also expanded into Revolut X, a standalone crypto exchange aimed at more active traders.

Fees vary by tier, but they sit roughly in the range of:

•⁠ ⁠~0–0.09% maker fees
•⁠ ⁠~0–0.49% taker fees depending on user tier

For a company with tens of millions of users, that creates enormous potential volume.

Possible directions:

•⁠ ⁠stablecoin accounts
•⁠ ⁠on-chain payments integrated into banking
•⁠ ⁠tokenised assets
•⁠ ⁠cross-border settlement infrastructure
•⁠ ⁠crypto yield products within regulated wrappers

If Revolut succeeds, it may blur the line between crypto exchange and neobank.

The long-term vision starts to look something like this:

A bank built natively for the internet.

If you enjoy reading deep threads on crypto infrastructure, one newsletter worth checking out is:

0xSammy - https://www.0xsammy.com/

It sits somewhere between:

•⁠ ⁠research
•⁠ ⁠crypto Twitter threads
•⁠ ⁠long-form essays

Recent pieces explore topics like:

•⁠ ⁠AI x crypto
•⁠ ⁠on-chain infrastructure
•⁠ ⁠emerging token models

The writing style is concise, opinionated, and technical enough to be useful without becoming unreadable.

Well worth subscribing to.

A couple of interesting signals from outside crypto this week.

The UK AI Sovereign Fund

The UK government is signaling serious ambition around AI infrastructure.

The AI Sovereign Fund concept aims to deploy capital into domestic AI capabilities, including compute infrastructure, research labs, and early-stage companies.

If executed well, it could position London as one of the major hubs for AI development.

For founders the implication is clear:

More capital.
More labs.
More talent clustering in London.

The London tech scene may be entering another growth cycle.

Last week I visited Koko Camden, the historic London music venue that reopened as part members club.

What stood out wasn’t just the venue.

It was the membership model.

Members get access to a series of benefits, one of the most interesting being the ability to watch gigs from a dedicated balcony area.

Not the best seats in the house.

It’s an interesting inversion of the traditional VIP model.

Instead of paying for the best experience, members get access to the event itself.

A subtle reminder that access is often more valuable than luxury.

Something community builders, including those of us running founder dinners, probably understand well.

Until next time