Agentic commerce will run on crypto rails, PayPal and Google reps tell Consensus Miami
Senior figures from PayPal and Google Cloud said open payment protocols, machine-readable merchant catalogs and multi-party crypto custody are needed to scale agentic commerce.
What to know:
- AI agents are structurally locked out of traditional bank accounts, leaving crypto rails as the natural payments layer.
- Google has launched the Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2), with 120 partners including PayPal, and donated it to the FIDO Foundation.
- A PayPal survey found 95% of merchants see AI agent traffic but only 20% have machine-readable catalogs.
Richard Widmann, global head of Web3 strategy at Google Cloud, said the existing internet user experience does not extend to autonomous agents.
“An agent cannot get a bank account. It’s not hard, it just is impossible,” he said, citing technological and regulatory barriers. Crypto, by contrast, is “a fantastic machine readable interface for payments,” Widmann said.
To address the gap, Google has launched the Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2), an open protocol that has been donated to the FIDO Foundation and has more than 120 partners including PayPal, Widmann said. He compared the move to the x402 internet-native payment standard given to the Linux Foundation.
“Open dialogues and open standards are really the foundation you need to build on,” Widmann said.
May Zabaneh, senior vice president and general manager of crypto at PayPal, said the company is treating agents as the next channel after PayPal’s evolution from offline to online to mobile commerce. PYUSD, the company’s stablecoin, is “a very natural programmable layer for payments,” she said, particularly as commerce trends toward globalization, AI-native experiences and tokenized assets.
