The blockchain infrastructure company is giving AI agents their own Visa payment tokens, email addresses, and crypto wallets to shop, book travel, and manage subscriptions autonomously.
Your AI assistant can now swipe a Visa. Alchemy, the blockchain infrastructure company that has powered over $2 trillion in onchain transactions, announced that its AgentCard product has integrated with Visa Intelligent Commerce, giving AI agents the ability to make purchases across the Visa network without a human lifting a finger.
The integration allows AI agents built on models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other providers to autonomously buy things online, book travel, order groceries, and manage subscriptions. Think of it as giving your AI a wallet, an identity, and permission to spend, all wrapped in a single API call that takes less than a minute to set up.
How AgentCard actually works #
Each AI agent provisioned through AgentCard receives a Visa-issued payment token, a dedicated email address through agentcard.email, a phone number, and a crypto wallet. The agent gets everything it needs to look like a legitimate transacting entity to any online merchant that accepts Visa.
The system also includes spend controls and real-time budget limits. A routing layer sits on top of it all, optimizing payment methods between traditional tokenized cards and crypto protocols where accepted.
From blockchain plumbing to AI commerce #
Alchemy built its reputation as the behind-the-scenes infrastructure powering blockchain applications. The company supports major corporations like JPMorgan and Stripe, and counts a16z, Coatue, Silver Lake, and Lightspeed among its investors.
Alchemy CEO Nikil Viswanathan framed AI agents as a new type of economic actor. Visa’s VP Tanner Riche pointed to the importance of secure identity and transaction methods for these new actors.
What this means for investors and the broader market #
Visa’s merchant acceptance footprint covers tens of millions of locations globally. An AI agent with a Visa token can theoretically transact almost anywhere a human with a Visa card can. Merchants don’t need to integrate anything new. They already accept Visa. The innovation sits entirely on the agent side, which dramatically lowers the adoption barrier.
AgentCard’s routing layer treats crypto and traditional payment rails as interchangeable options, suggesting Alchemy sees the future of AI commerce as hybrid, where stablecoins and tokenized cards coexist depending on which is cheaper, faster, or more widely accepted for a given transaction.
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