Agentic commerce – where AI “agents” autonomously browse, compare, and pay on behalf of users – is rapidly moving from concept to implementation, and major payments and crypto firms are now jockeying to define the underlying rails. Visa has introduced a Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP), a cryptographic scheme built on HTTP Message Signatures that lets merchants verify that an AI agent initiating a transaction is legitimate, acting for a real consumer, and carrying valid payment details. TAP is positioned as a “trust layer” for AI-led payments that works on existing card infrastructure rather than replacing it, aiming to help merchants distinguish trustworthy AI agents from malicious bots amid a reported 4,700% surge in AI-driven shopping traffic to U.S. retail sites over the past year. In parallel, Stripe and OpenAI have worked on an Agentic Commerce Protocol and other payment providers are exploring how to support “always-on” AI agents that negotiate prices, move funds, and transact across borders without human intervention. This has sharpened a debate over whether new crypto-native rails are needed, or whether existing card and bank infrastructure can simply be upgraded. Coinbase argues that agentic commerce will require real-time, autonomous, programmable payments and that stablecoin/crypto rails such as its proposed x402 and MPP (multi-party payments) are the only scalable path for AI agents transacting globally and around the clock. By contrast, banking infrastructure provider Increase contends that “the existing rails are best,” suggesting that the real leverage is exposing programmable, low-level access and better workflows on top of today’s systems rather than reinventing money movement. The result is a strategic race: incumbents like Visa and Stripe are trying to make current rails agent-ready, while crypto players like Coinbase push for fully on-chain, stablecoin-based architectures – a divergence that will shape how AI agents pay, which networks capture volume, and how much of this new commerce layer depends on crypto versus traditional payments. "entities":["Visa","Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP)","Stripe","OpenAI","Agentic Commerce Protocol","Coinbase","x402","MPP (multi-party payments)","stablecoins","Increase","Oscilar","Cloudflare","agentic commerce","AI agents","Visa card network"]}`

AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

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