Tomorrow in Prague: @KB_SmartSol Crypto & Banking Breakfast. The question: Do agents need stablecoins, or can cards do the job?
My take: both, for different flows. The hard part is the trust layer in between.
luma.com/1keliaz1
x402 & MPP let you pay per API call with crypto — no account, no key. I tested both for real.
They work. But ~7x slower per call than a plain key (small sample, not a rigorous benchmark).
Not a speed win — built for agents that show up with a wallet and nothing else.
Map of Agentic Payments
- commerce
- machine payments
- treasury
- currency
- standards & trust
paidbyagent.com/map/
"Agentic payments" isn't one market. It's three: commerce, machine payments, treasury — different protocols, different rails, different rivalries (ACP vs UCP, Visa vs Mastercard).
98.6% of machine-native micropayments already settle in USDC.
Full map: zdne.org/articles/agentic-pa…
In a few hours I'm joining O'Reilly's API Superstream to talk about what's actually live vs. what's still hype in agentic commerce — x402, UCP, ACP, and why B2B is where the real money is moving, not the chatbot checkout demos.
Free to join, 11am ET: bit.ly/49VKu25
Mastercard's paradox: Building agentic commerce rails for the future that could make them irrelevant.
If agents can route payments anywhere, the Mastercard is an option, not a necessity.
Their trust layer is a self-preservation dressed as innovation.
finance.yahoo.com/video/stab…
B2B agentic commerce loop is almost closed.
Agentforce: seller side. Quotes, negotiates.
SAP: buyer side. Evaluates bids, selects winner.
MS Dynamics: execution side. Reroutes supply chains.
No human.
Nobody has connected them yet.
That's the $2–5T question.
When humans stop searching — who controls what agents find?
If your catalog isn't agent-readable, you're not losing the bid. You're not in the room.
Google sees this clearly. UCP isn't just a checkout protocol. It's Google making sure it stays the front door of the internet.
Drama is unfolding in agentic commerce. And it's 1:0 for merchants.
OpenAI's Instant Checkout: killed March 2026. Merchants refused to become ghost kitchens — invisible fulfilment behind OpenAI's brand.
Google: Ulta: all in. Gap: refused. Same protocol. Opposite philosophy.
Today's protocols — ACP, UCP, x402 — are AI-assisted. A human clicks, agent helps.
What's coming is AI-executed. The agent decides. The agent pays. Nobody clicks.
Three steps. Zero humans. Different category entirely.
[4/12] #UnBundled #AgenticCommerce
youtu.be/veINk-Qnu8Y?si=8beO…
'25 was year zero for agentic commerce. Most of fintech didn't notice.
3 protocols. 6 months. AI agents can now transact autonomously.
Fintech was debating open banking. The protocol layer got built around it.
[2/11] #UnBundled #AgenticCommerce
Fintech spent 15 years making payments faster for humans.
That assumption just broke.
My keynote on agentic commerce at #UnBundled 👇
luma.com/znvxfc7d
Tomorrow, we will pack most of what I’ve learned about the AI use of APIs into ten points. Join us at maven.com/p/d4116d/ai-agents…
10% agentic AI reliability? That’s not production-ready. That’s a demo. superface.ai/blog/agent-real…
MCP will snowball from now on. Glad we saw this coming with @superfaceai and are the first agentic tooling platform to support it! superface.ai/blog/connect-cl…
Superface agentic connectivity is now available for Claude! Connect your Claude app to APIs without coding: docs.superface.ai/Connect-Cl…
