More than two dozen of the world’s largest payments, financial infrastructure, and blockchain companies have banded together to build the rulebook for a rapidly emerging market: commerce cond
More than two dozen of the world’s largest payments, financial infrastructure, and blockchain companies have banded together to build the rulebook for a rapidly emerging market: commerce conducted autonomously by AI agents.
The Agentic Payments Alliance (APA), announced August 18 by stablecoin infrastructure company Rain, brings together Visa, Mastercard, Circle, Solana, Fiserv, and more than 20 other organizations to define how artificial intelligence systems will authorize, execute, and secure financial transactions on behalf of humans and businesses.
Why This Alliance Exists Now
The coalition’s formation is driven by a specific and urgent problem: agentic commerce — a model where AI agents don’t merely recommend a purchase but actually initiate, authorize, and complete financial transactions autonomously — is projected by McKinsey to reach between $3 trillion and $5 trillion globally by 2030. Yet the foundational infrastructure that market will depend on remains almost entirely undefined. How does a merchant verify an AI agent is authorized to spend on a user’s behalf? How does fraud detection work when the “customer” is a machine rather than a person? How do loyalty programs and rewards apply to a transaction with no human directly present at checkout?
Rain, the company that organized the alliance, framed the initiative as an attempt to answer these questions collectively rather than allow each major payments player to build incompatible, siloed systems independently. “No single company should get to decide how agents transact on someone’s behalf,” said Farooq Malik, co-founder and CEO of Rain. “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. We initiated the Agentic Payments Alliance to put all of these parties in the same room, and to do it now, while the category is still taking shape.”
Who’s Involved
The APA’s founding membership spans the entire payments and crypto infrastructure stack. On the traditional finance side, Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, and Remitly represent established card networks and payment processors. On the crypto and blockchain side, founding members include Circle (issuer of the USDC stablecoin), the Solana Foundation, Avalanche, Uniswap Labs, Monad, and Chainalysis, the blockchain analytics firm widely used for compliance and fraud tracking. Digital asset infrastructure providers Fireblocks — which has secured more than $14 trillion in transactions to date — and custody platform Turnkey have also joined as founding members, alongside payment technology firms including Lithic, Sardine, Shift4, Basis Theory, Coinflow, Crossmint, Episode Six, Evertec, PayOS, and Yuno.
Sherri Haymond, executive vice president and global head of Digital Commercialization at Mastercard, framed the company’s participation as a continuation of its historical role in shaping commerce standards:
“For decades, Mastercard has helped shape the standards that enable commerce at scale, and our participation in the Agentic Payments Alliance is a natural extension of that work for the agentic era.”
Solana Foundation echoed similar reasoning in its own public statement announcing participation:
“Agents are becoming economic actors, and how they pay for things needs to be on a global money layer that stays open to anyone.”
How the Alliance Will Actually Operate
The APA is structured as a collectively governed working coalition rather than an entity owned or controlled by any single founding member. Participating organizations will jointly establish the alliance’s charter and mission. Its early priorities are expected to include shared research and technical frameworks, testing emerging standards for verifying agent identity and authorization, and advocacy work addressing the regulatory questions that autonomous AI-driven commerce raises for policymakers.
Founding members will also receive early access to Rain’s Agentic Startup Program, an accelerator supporting early-stage companies building specifically for agentic commerce. The program’s first cohort — five startups — will present at a demo day open exclusively to Alliance members, giving founding organizations direct visibility into emerging applications and use cases within the category.
Rain’s Head Start on the Problem
Rain’s ability to convene this broad a coalition stems from infrastructure work the company says it has spent the past year building. Its Agent Control Layer and Scoped Cards products are designed to give AI agents payment credentials that are widely accepted by merchants while remaining deliberately limited in scope — for example, restricting an agent’s spending to specific categories, merchants, or dollar amounts, reducing the potential damage from a compromised or malfunctioning agent.
As both a Visa and Mastercard Principal Member, Rain already issues cards usable at more than 175 million merchant locations across over 200 countries and territories, giving the company practical, operational experience relevant to the standards the APA aims to establish.
Not the Only Game in Town
The APA is one of several parallel efforts racing to define agentic commerce infrastructure. Separately, Google and Mastercard are backing a related initiative through the FIDO Alliance focused on interoperable identity standards, with Google contributing its open protocol and Mastercard providing its Verifiable Intent trust layer.
Additionally, a competing but overlapping effort called x402 — an open standard for agent-initiated payments — has already seen meaningful real-world adoption, with transactions on Coinbase’s Base network rising from near-zero in mid-2025 to more than 100 million cumulative transactions by early 2026, while a Solana-based deployment processed roughly 35 million transactions and $10 million in volume over a similar period. That parallel protocol counts Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Google, AWS, Circle, Coinbase, and multiple blockchain foundations among its own 40 founding backers — with some companies, notably Circle and Coinbase, participating in multiple competing coalitions simultaneously while positioning their own settlement infrastructure to become the default layer underneath.
Why This Matters Beyond Payments
The formation of the Agentic Payments Alliance is a concrete signal that the infrastructure underlying the current AI boom is expanding well beyond model capability and into the financial plumbing needed to let AI systems act with real economic agency. As AI agents increasingly move from answering questions to executing tasks — including purchasing goods, subscribing to services, or managing recurring payments — the question of how those agents are authenticated, authorized, and held accountable for fraudulent or erroneous transactions becomes a foundational requirement rather than a hypothetical concern.
Notably, stablecoins occupy a central position across nearly every organization involved in this space. Circle’s participation reinforces its ambition to position USDC as the default settlement currency for autonomous agent transactions, while Solana’s involvement signals which blockchain networks are positioning themselves to capture the transaction volume this market is expected to generate.
As Zil Bareisis, a director at research firm Celent, noted regarding the broader agentic commerce push: for the category to succeed at scale, AI agents must be trusted by everyone involved — consumers, merchants, payment companies, and banks alike — making the standards-setting work now underway within coalitions like the APA foundational to whether agentic commerce becomes a mainstream reality or remains constrained by fragmented, incompatible systems.
