Mastercard Launches AI Agent Pay Protocol

BlockBeats News, June 10th. Mastercard announced the launch of a new protocol called Agent Pay for AI, allowing AI agents to make payments to each other and conduct micropayments — for example, when an AI agent automatically pays for data as it streams from a website segment. The permissions granted by humans to AI agents are stored on the blockchain, with the initial implementation using the Polygon network to ensure transparency and verifiability, allowing all parties to verify whether the agent has acted as instructed. Companies such as Adyen, Coinbase, and Cloudflare are collaborating with Mastercard to develop this protocol.

Mastercard's Chief Product Officer, Jorn Lambert, stated that the protocol will not be a significant source of revenue in the short term, but is expected to evolve into a meaningful new market in the next five years. Industry giants like Visa, Stripe, Coinbase, and Google are actively working on AI payment protocols, collectively driving the future of "machine-to-machine payments" and AI chatbots leading e-commerce transactions, although the volume of agent-based payments remains relatively small at present.