A Coalition Takes Shape Around Agent-Driven Commerce Monad (@monad) Foundation and Avalanche (@avax) have signed on as founding members of the Agentic Payments Alliance (APA), a new industry
Monad (@monad) Foundation and Avalanche (@avax) have signed on as founding members of the Agentic Payments Alliance (APA), a new industry coalition designed to build the infrastructure underpinning commerce conducted by autonomous AI agents.
The APA was announced by Rain (@raincards), the enterprise-grade infrastructure provider for stablecoin-powered payments, as a coalition of organizations working together to help guide the development of agentic commerce.Other founding members include Avalanche, Basis Theory, Chainalysis, Circle, Coinflow, Crossmint, delta Network, Episode Six, Evertec, Fireblocks, Fiserv, Kala, Lithic, Mastercard, Monad, PayOS, Rain, Remitly, Rialo by Subzero Labs, Sardine, Shift4, Solana, Turnkey, Uniswap Labs, Visa, and Yuno.
The alliance operates as a working coalition, run collectively by its founding members rather than owned by any one company, with members setting its charter and mission together.
Early work is expected to include shared research and frameworks, testing emerging standards for agent identity and authorization, and advocacy on the regulatory questions agentic commerce raises. The challenges are significant. Fraud prevention in a world of autonomous agents is fundamentally different from today's models, as current detection relies heavily on behavioral patterns like typing speed, location data, and purchase history, none of which apply to AI agents.
Regulatory questions loom even larger, as most financial regulations assume a human is making decisions. When an AI agent initiates a large wire transfer, it remains unclear whether that triggers standard reporting requirements or who bears responsibility if the agent is compromised.
By 2030, McKinsey projects between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global agentic commerce, with much of the infrastructure, including how agents get authorized and how fraud gets caught, still being defined. The APA was formed to bring the people building that infrastructure into the same conversation before those decisions get made in isolation.
Rain CEO Farooq Malik framed the alliance's purpose bluntly: "No single company should get to decide how agents transact on someone's behalf. That has to come from the platforms building the rails, the regulators setting the rules, and the innovators closest to how agents are actually being used today."
Founding members will also receive early access to Rain's Agentic Startup Program, an accelerator supporting early-stage companies building for agentic commerce.
Sources:Rain official press release via PR NewswireFinextra: Visa and Mastercard back new Agentic Payments AllianceAmerican Banker: Rain, Visa, Mastercard build Agentic Payments Alliance
