Mastercard launches protocol to let AI agents pay each other with blockchain verification

Mastercard launches protocol to let AI agents pay each other, send micropayments | Fortune

Mastercard is diving deeper into AI payments. The card giant announced on Wednesday that it was launching a protocol to let AI actors more easily pay each other. Called Agent Pay for AI, the new network is meant to make smaller money transfers easier when, for example, an AI agent wants to access data piecemeal from a website. To ensure that bots act as instructed, Mastercard's new protocol stores permissions that humans grant their AI agents onto a blockchain. As opposed to a private database, this information is accessible to multiple parties that want to verify whether an agent is acting as instructed. Initially, Mastercard chose to log those permissions onto Polygon, a network of blockchains built on top of Ethereum, the card company's spokesperson told Fortune. Other companies that are working with the payments giant to develop its AI payments protocol include the fintech Adyen, the crypto exchange Coinbase, and the web-hosting giant Cloudflare. "Am I expecting that this is going to be a huge revenue driver for Mastercard next year? No," said Jorn Lambert, Mastercard's chief product officer. "Do I think it'll be a meaningful new addressable market for us over the next five years? I think so." Machine payments Mastercard isn't the only financial giant to devote resources to the burgeoning field of agentic finance. Corporate heavyweights like Visa and Stripe have also built out tools and protocols in anticipation of a future where bots will buy our groceries, manage our bank accounts, and pay for our video streaming subscriptions. While that vision hasn't yet come to pass -- agentic payment volumes are still a fraction of broader commercial flows -- companies are still believers that humans will use AI to pay for products and that bots will pay other bots. For his own part, Mastercard's Lambert predicted that AI chatbots will eventually sit between a meaningful share of e-commerce transactions. "It's just easier for consumers to do," he said. And while he was less certain of whether "machine-to-machine payments" will take off, he said that "too much is happening in that space" for some version of a bot-to-bot ecosystem not to take shape. Other companies to have launched AI payment networks and standards over the past year include Coinbase, which is behind the x402 protocol; Stripe, which worked with the blockchain project Tempo to develop what they call the Machine Payments Protocol; and Google, which released its own standard in September.

Mastercard Enables AI Agent Payments With Help From Crypto Giants Like Coinbase, Ripple

Coinbase, OKX, Polygon, RippleX, Stripe, Cloudflare, and more than two dozen other companies are participating. Mastercard on Wednesday announced the launch of Agent Pay for Machines, a payments platform designed to let AI agents transact autonomously using cards, bank accounts, and stablecoins. According to Mastercard, the platform is designed to let AI systems buy services and send payments on their own, including small transactions that occur in the background. The service expands on the company's Agent Pay program by enabling payments between AI agents, software platforms, and connected machines. "Agent Pay for Machines will create the conditions for a superbloom of AI business models," Mastercard Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert said in a statement. "Machine payments can make it possible for services to be bought and sold among agents at fundamentally different scales than payments today -- very high volumes, very small values, very fast, and at extremely low latency." More than 30 companies have joined the effort, including Coinbase, OKX, Polygon, RippleX, Aave Labs, Alchemy, Anchorage Digital, BVNK, MoonPay, Stripe, Cloudflare, and the Solana Foundation. The launch marks Mastercard's latest push into AI-powered commerce as companies across the payments and crypto industries -- including MoonPay, MetaMask, and Coinbase -- explore how autonomous AI agents could eventually buy services and complete transactions without direct human involvement. The announcement also comes after several moves by Mastercard into the cryptocurrency market this year. In March, Mastercard launched a Crypto Partner Program with more than 85 companies, including Binance, Ripple, and PayPal, to develop products that combine digital assets with Mastercard's payment network. Later that month, Mastercard agreed to acquire stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, a deal aimed at expanding its capabilities around digital asset payments and settlement. Mastercard has also spent much of 2026 expanding its stablecoin business. In March, the company joined Solana's enterprise blockchain platform to support stablecoin settlement. Earlier this month, Mastercard expanded its program for settling transactions using regulated stablecoins, including Circle's USDC and Ripple's RLUSD.

Mastercard Enables AI Agents to Pay Each Other | PYMNTS.com

The new Agent Pay for Machines builds on Mastercard's Agent Pay program by adding capabilities for high-frequency, low-latency, low-value payments executed by agents and machines, the company said in a Wednesday (June 10) press release. This infrastructure can handle payments that are continuous, embedded, permissioned and executed at machine speed, and it can support credentialing, controls and guaranteed settlement across cards, stablecoins and other payment types, according to the release. Its capabilities could be used, for example, by a merchant's AI agent to launch a store's web presence by buying a domain name, a hosting service, images and checkout pages, per the release. "Agent Pay for Machines will create the conditions for a superbloom of AI business models," Mastercard Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert said in the release. "Machine payments can make it possible for services to be bought and sold among agents at fundamentally different scales than payments today -- very high volumes, very small values, very fast and at extremely low latency." Mastercard is collaborating with more than 30 initial partners to scale an open ecosystem for Agent Pay forMachines by validating priority use cases, establishing common rules and accelerating adoption across industries, per the release. Karan Katyal, head of agentic commerce at Adyen, which is one of the initial partners, said in the release that infrastructure decisions made now will determine how the machine-to-machine payments space develops. "Building these foundations with partners like Mastercard, openly and with merchant outcomes at the center, is how we ensure this next era of commerce works for everyone in the ecosystem," Katyal said. Mastercard's launch of Agent Pay for Machines follows the company's April 2025 introduction of Agent Pay. The company said at the time that Agent Pay is an agentic AI-driven payments program designed to help unlock an agentic commerce future by, for example, integrating payments experiences into generative AI-powered conversational platforms. In March, Mastercard introduced Verifiable Intent, an open-source, standards-based framework designed for agentic commerce. The company said Verifiable Intent is designed to link a consumer's identity, their specific instructions and the outcome of a transaction into a single, tamper-resistant record, creating a cryptographic audit trail that all parties can consult if a dispute arises.