Opinion: The AI Agent economy will operate on a crypto track, with stablecoins and on-chain payments becoming core infrastructure.

According to AIMPACT, on May 10th (UTC+8), at the Consensus Miami conference, executives from Google Cloud and PayPal stated that with the arrival of the AI Agent business era, crypto payments and stablecoins will become the core infrastructure of the next generation of the internet economy. Richard Widmann, Head of Web3 Strategy at Google Cloud, pointed out that AI agents cannot open bank accounts like humans under the existing financial system, while cryptocurrencies naturally possess the characteristic of "machine-readable payment interfaces," making them more suitable as the underlying settlement tools for AI-automated transaction and payment systems. He revealed that Google has launched the open Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2) and donated it to the FIDO Foundation, with over 120 partners, including PayPal, already participating. May Zabaneh, Senior Vice President of Crypto at PayPal, stated that AI agents are becoming the next generation of business entry points after offline, online, and mobile internet, while stablecoins such as PYUSD provide a natural programmable payment layer for AI-native payments, global transactions, and the circulation of tokenized assets. She cited a PayPal survey, stating that 95% of merchant websites currently experience traffic from AI agents, but only about 20% have established machine-readable product catalogs, meaning a large number of merchants are not yet ready for the era of AI agent-driven automated shopping and transactions. Furthermore, both parties emphasized the issues of fund security and liability in the AI agent era. Widmann stated that multi-party custody will become a critical infrastructure, and in the future, AI agents should not independently control the complete private key, but should only hold partial key fragments to reduce financial and operational risks. (Source: ME)