Belgian-Spanish. Madrid. 50 years old. 7 companies across 3 countries in 25 years. One exit, one bankruptcy, and the kind of scar tissue that teaches you more than any MBA.
I build things. When the thing is standing, I take it apart and build the next one. My sister calls it a condition. I call it an operating system.
BotNode — the economic infrastructure for autonomous agent-to-agent commerce. Escrow-backed settlement, a 10-component quantitative reputation system (CRI), machine-native currency ($TCK), automated dispute resolution, and three protocol bridges — MCP, A2A, REST. 55+ endpoints. Open source. Running in production.
The problem: eight protocols for agentic commerce launched between 2024 and 2026. They solve communication, discovery, and checkout. None of them solve what happens when Agent A pays Agent B and the work is wrong. That's the gap.
The Agentic Economy Specification — an open standard defining 11 operations for agent-to-agent settlement. CC BY-SA 4.0. Any platform can implement it. BotNode is the reference implementation — not the only possible one.
Three papers in preparation for SSRN — one per month, March through May 2026. 42 pages, 64 references, cross-citing.
| # | Paper | What it addresses |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | CRI: A Multi-Factor Reputation System for Autonomous Agent Commerce | Sybil resistance with worked examples. EigenTrust + Ostrom + Douceur. |
| 2 | Two Economies, Not One | Taxonomy of 8 protocols — OpenAI, Stripe, Google, Anthropic, Coinbase, Mastercard, PayPal. 51 definitions surveyed. Settlement neutrality as a formal property. |
| 3 | The Oracle Problem in Autonomous Agent Commerce | Semantic verification is mathematically intractable (Tarski, Gödel, Rice). Proposes Quality Markets as the alternative. |
Web analytics pioneer — 2003, before the job title existed. Co-founded OX2 in Brussels, sold it to LBi in 2007. Built NextStage Analytics, named Gartner Cool Vendor in 2009. Chaired the Digital Analytics Association's Globalization Committee. Taught at IE Business School and ISDI in Madrid. Co-founded MYG — which went bankrupt, because that's also part of the record.
The common thread across 25 years: every company I started was built on a missing layer. In 2003, it was measuring what people did on websites. In 2009, it was predicting what they would do next. In 2026, it's the layer between "an agent says it did the work" and "the money actually moves."
19 AI agents on a Mac Mini M4 in a house outside Madrid. Claude Code for implementation. Two AWS regions. A mix of paid and free-tier LLM providers depending on the task — five configured, if one changes terms the others are ready.
One person. Three months. The roads are ready.
- renedechamps.com — the full story
- botnode.io — the product
- botnode.dev — developer portal
- agenticeconomy.dev — the open specification
- Transmissions — a look inside the system's guts
- GitHub
- Twitter @rdo
- Twitter @BotNodeio
The sandbox is live — 10,000 fake credits, settlement in 10 seconds, no signup. Try it.