In the first half of 2026, major payment companies including Google, Mastercard, Visa, Stripe, American Express, Ant International, and Circle have shipped infrastructure for AI agents to handle payme…
Mastercard launched agent-to-agent payments, validating the agentic payments market. However, AgentWallex argues that legacy card infrastructure is incompatible with agent-native operations, which req…
A new study by fraud-prevention firm Riskified found that 61.5% of US and UK consumers use AI for shopping, but 55% are uncomfortable with AI agents making purchases on their behalf. Half of consumers…
OKX launched an open protocol on April 29 that enables AI agents to autonomously hire, pay, and dispute with each other on-chain, aiming to become the payment infrastructure for the agentic economy. T…
Adyen launched Adyen Agentic, a modular API suite enabling AI-driven commerce through conversational channels, with early partners including American Express, Mastercard, Visa, and Salesforce. The sui…
A new $500 million fund called Intercept, backed by Stripe and Anthropic, launched June 24 to finance treatments and technologies aimed at eliminating respiratory infections like the common cold and f…
At Open Source Summit North America 2026, Google and Shopify's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) proposed an open infrastructure for agentic commerce, citing a Bain forecast that agentic shopping coul…
Four teams shipped progress on agent commerce this week: Mastercard's agent-payment program records authorizations on Polygon, Coinbase's x402 protocol expands to mainstream web infrastructure, Eco pr…
Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and other tech companies launched the Appia Foundation to create modular specifications that help enterprises demonstrate their AI systems comply with global standards and r…
Automated AI agents now generate 57.5% of HTML web traffic, surpassing human traffic for the first time, according to Cloudflare Radar data announced by CEO Matthew Prince on June 3, 2026. HUMAN Secur…
Alchemy launched AgentCard, a virtual Visa card and identity platform for AI agents that integrates with Visa Intelligent Commerce, provisioning a Visa payment token, email, phone number, and crypto w…
Alchemy launched AgentCard, a virtual payment product enabling AI agents to autonomously issue and use one-time Visa cards for online transactions. The product, announced on March 13, 2026, is in priv…
An AI agent wallet is a system that allows AI agents to autonomously spend money within predefined limits without human approval for each transaction. Protocols like Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, Mas…
Meta is expanding live shopping ads globally on Facebook and Instagram, partnering with Mastercard and Visa to introduce virtual card checkout in the U.S. this summer, and making product data a founda…
Mastercard's former chief marketing officer Raja Rajamannar says AI is creating a 'sea of sameness' in marketing but argues this will usher in a 'golden era' where original creativity and consumer ins…
A new study from brand consultancy Lippincott reveals that 80% of CMOs say bureaucracy hinders decision-making, and 84% find it difficult to align stakeholders around a marketing vision, despite gaini…
A developer argues that the agent economy's focus on payment rails misses the critical incentive and identity problems that prevent trust-minimized settlement networks from bootstrapping. While atomic…
Visa and Mastercard have announced AI agent payment capabilities, but these solutions are retrofits of legacy card infrastructure, not true autonomous payment systems. Catena Labs, founded by Circle c…
NVIDIA released a developer example for building a transaction foundation model using accelerated computing, demonstrating a near-50% lift in fraud detection Average Precision over an XGBoost baseline…
Animoca Brands cofounder Yat Siu argues that Asia will lead the fusion of AI and blockchain technology, citing less ideological resistance than in the West. He believes blockchain is essential for ena…