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2 months ago by fiodar
It was impossible to miss all the discussions, long-form articles, and announcements around agentic finance in recent weeks. In the past few days alone:
Santander and Mastercard completed Europe’s first live end-to-end payment executed by an AI agent.
Solana integrated an Agent Registry to give AI agents verifiable identity and portable reputation.
Tether expanded its Wallet Development Kit to enable agents to access self-custodial wallets.
OKX launched a new toolkit that allows agents to manage wallets, make payments, and trade.
Circle introduced USDC Nanopayments designed for machine-to-machine payments.
But given the opportunity, these moves shouldn't be that surprising.
According to McKinsey, AI agents could mediate $3 to $5 trillion in global retail commerce by 2030. For context: that would represent a majority of today’s global e-commerce market, which is estimated at around $6.4 trillion.
But what does the agentic commerce landscape look like right now?
How do the solutions offered by traditional players differ from those built by crypto-native companies?
How are AI agents using crypto today?
These are all questions we asked ourselves. Yet we struggled to find a resource that offers a clear, digestible overview addressing them all.
So we @block_stories decided to create such an overview.
For that, we spoke with people from leading firms building and researching this emerging vertical:
Irfan Ganchi, SVP, Product Management Payments at @circle, whose USDC stablecoin accounts for over 90% of agentic payment volume onchain.
@programmer, Head of Engineering at @CoinbaseDev and creator of x402, the dominant payments protocol for onchain agentic commerce.
@OnchainLu from @artemis, who researches agentic payments and built one of the most comprehensive dashboards tracking x402 data (my personal go-to).
@Uptodatenow, VP Research at @galaxyhq, who authored multiple in-depth reports on agentic payments (find them here and here).
And now, please find our condensed findings below.
The infrastructure is emerging along two tracks: traditional payment networks extending their rails for AI agents, and crypto-native protocols enabling agents to transact independently.
On the first track, Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), Visa’s Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard’s Agent Pay, and Stripe’s ACP all follow the same logic: the agent acts as an interface layer on top of existing payment rails, using a user’s existing accounts and credentials to search, compare, and complete purchases.
On the second, the dominant protocol is x402, developed by Coinbase, which embeds stablecoin payments directly into HTTP requests. This allows software to pay other software without setting up dedicated accounts, going through complex onboarding, or involving human intervention.
"Agents don't need blockchain rails to buy T-shirts on behalf of their users. Instead, agents will turn to crypto for microtransactions and niche services. Things get really exciting once agent-to-agent interactions and agentic run companies begin to scale, then the value proposition becomes a lot more clear."
Lucas Tcheyan, VP Research – Galaxy
Traditional payment infrastructure assumes that every transaction is tied to a human or legal entity. Autonomous agents do not fit into this model, and blockchain removes this dependency. Any AI agent with a wallet can hold funds and transact without needing approval from a financial intermediary. Crypto rails also make micropayments viable that card fee structures render uneconomical.
Together, these properties open the door to a new class of internet-native businesses. Traditionally, developers who wanted to monetize digital products or services first had to establish a legal entity, build a website, and integrate with a payment processor. Protocols like x402 remove much of this friction by allowing developers to accept stablecoin payments directly via HTTP.
"We’re also seeing early machine-to-machine transactions, where autonomous systems can trigger and settle payments without human intervention when a service is delivered. These are exactly the kinds of flows that legacy rails struggle to support because they require always-on settlement, low transaction overhead, and programmability by default."
Irfan Ganchi, SVP, Product Management Payments – Circle
The dominant use case today is agents paying for digital resources such as API access, data feeds, compute, or AI-generated content. Since launching last October, x402 has processed roughly 105 million transactions worth about $14.5 million, primarily on Base and Solana.
“An emerging use case is breaking up data silos. For example, someone with access to the X or LinkedIn APIs could create a paid endpoint that lets agents retrieve profile data or other information on demand, paying per request instead of setting up direct API access themselves.”
Lucas Shin, Agentic Payments – Artemis
Beyond data access, the first outlines of autonomous agent businesses are beginning to emerge. @FelixCraftAI, an autonomous agent, generated roughly $70,000 in 30 days by building and selling digital products. Another agent called @KellyClaudeAI develops iOS apps end-to-end, from ideation to App Store submission.
While these are still proofs of concept, they clearly point to a new paradigm: AI agents that participate in an economy of their own.
Two key components are still missing.
The first is trust. Onchain payments are irreversible and offer no chargebacks, which means agents must determine which counterparties they can rely on before transacting. Standards such as ERC-8004 aim to address this by introducing onchain reputation registries. However, these systems only become useful once a sufficient history of interactions has accumulated.
The second is discovery. Agents have limited ways to find services offered by other agents, and developers building agent-facing products lack distribution channels. What’s missing is a curated catalog where agents can discover endpoints, verify legitimacy, and access them directly.
"The next thing we're building towards for broader adoption is standardization and distribution — more services supporting native, pay-per-call payments and more agents built to use them by default."
Erik Reppel, Head of Engineering – Coinbase Developer Platform
Agentic commerce is emerging as a new economic layer. AI agents are beginning to act as economic actors that can search for services, initiate transactions, and complete payments on behalf of users or autonomously.
Two infrastructure tracks are forming. Traditional payment networks such as Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and Google are adapting existing rails for agents, while crypto-native systems like Coinbase’s x402 embed stablecoin payments directly into internet protocols.
Early onchain use cases center on digital services. Today, most agent transactions involve paying for APIs, data feeds, compute, or AI-generated content. At the same time, early examples of agents generating revenue by building and selling digital products point to the emergence of fully AI-run businesses.
Adoption depends on trust and discovery infrastructure. For agentic commerce to scale, agents must be able to assess counterparty reliability through reputation systems and discover services through standardized marketplaces or registries.
Agentic Commerce Won’t Kill Cards, But It’ll Open A Gap by @nlevine19
The Financial Rails of Agentic Commerce by @cosmo_jiang and @SPLehman
Agentic Payments and Crypto’s Emerging Role in the AI Economy and Raising for Robots: Developing Agentic Capital Markets by @Uptodatenow
Comprehensive x402 data dashboard and Agentic Commerce Market Map by @OnchainLu
This piece was initially published in the @block_stories Crypto Briefing, our weekly newsletter covering key events in the onchain economy.
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AgentTech
@agenttech
Awesome article! Any luck to check my YOLO agentpay-sdk? https://t.co/1hQ10dzlGr