In August 2026, Visa, Mastercard, Solana and Circle joined the Agentic Payments Alliance, a 26-member coalition launched by stablecoin infrastructure company Rain to help develop standards for AI agents making payments on behalf of humans.
The move brings major players from traditional payments and crypto into the same conversation. It also points to a problem the industry will have to solve sooner rather than later: how do you verify an AI agent, determine what it is allowed to do and establish who is responsible when something goes wrong?
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Vilhelm German, a long-time crypto executive, looks at what the rise of AI agents means for payments — from agent identity and authorization to the role of stablecoins and the security challenges that come with letting software move money.
“Agents can already make decisions and initiate payments, but the rules around them haven’t caught up,” German says. “The industry now needs a reliable way to know who an agent represents, what it can do and who is accountable.”
The Payment Infrastructure Gap
Today’s payment architecture, including card networks, 3D Secure authentication and tokenized credentials, was largely built around a model in which a human ultimately authorizes a payment or sets the rules for automated transactions.
That model starts to look different when an agent can handle the entire purchasing journey, from deciding what to buy to completing the payment.
The industry is already adapting. In April 2025, Mastercard introduced Agent Pay, which uses tokenized credentials to identify trusted AI agents and allow them to transact within consumer-defined permissions and controls.
Visa is also developing its Intelligent Commerce platform, including tools such as Agent Score and an agent registry.
At the same time, Coinbase and Cloudflare launched the x402 protocol for stablecoin payments between machines. By 2026, it had processed around 165 million agent transactions.
“We’re seeing two different use cases,” says German. “Cards make sense when an agent is buying something for you. But when agents start paying each other for data, API calls or computing power, you need infrastructure built for much higher transaction volumes and frequency.”
That raises a broader infrastructure question. Payment systems need to handle not just the transaction itself, but also the identity, authorization and rules attached to it.
Who Is the Agent Acting For?
For the KYC and fraud prevention industry, one of the harder questions is straightforward: how do you know an AI agent is actually authorized to act for a person?
Traditional identity verification is built around people. An AI agent is neither a person nor simply a device. It acts on someone’s behalf, which creates new questions around authorization and liability.
The industry is already working on this. In October 2025, Visa and Cloudflare partnered to introduce the Trusted Agent Protocol, or TAP, which uses cryptographic signatures to help merchants distinguish legitimate AI shopping agents from bots.
The technology can help verify an agent’s authorization, connect it to a verified human identity, and enforce spending limits before a transaction is completed.
But proving that an agent is legitimate does not answer every question.
“Traditional identity verification asked, ‘Is this person who they say they are?’” German says. “With agents, you also need to know whether they’re authorized to act for that person, what they’re allowed to do and who is responsible if they go beyond those limits.”
That is a different problem from traditional KYC, and most existing systems simply aren’t designed to solve that problem today.
Cards or Stablecoins?
Identity is only one part of the problem. The payment rail itself may also need to change depending on what the agent is buying.
Today, AI payment agents can make hundreds or even thousands of payments a day for API calls, data, model inference, or computing power. When each transaction is worth a cent or less, traditional card economics can become difficult because processing and network fees may outweigh the payment itself.
That is where stablecoins become more interesting. They can support small, programmatic payments without the same fee structure as traditional card transactions.
Payment companies are already moving in that direction. Mastercard has entered the stablecoin infrastructure market through its acquisition of BVNK, while Visa is expanding stablecoin settlement across nine blockchains.
McKinsey estimates that agentic commerce could reach $3 trillion to $5 trillion globally by 2030.
Vilhelm German does not see the future as a simple choice between cards and stablecoins.
“Both will probably have a role,” he says. “Cards are a natural fit for consumer purchases. Stablecoins may make more sense when machines are paying machines at high frequency.”
For him, the harder problem is building the layer that sits above the payment rail — one that can establish who an agent represents, what it is authorized to do and who is accountable when something goes wrong.
“The question isn’t whether agents can pay,” German says. “It’s whether we can trust them to pay on our behalf.”
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