Paying at Agentic Speed: Inside Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Push

July 2026

Fintech & Payments

Jawad Jahan

Senior Research Analyst

The term agentic commerce describes a new class of software, usually called an AI agent, that can be handed a budget and a task and left to finish a purchase on its own. For example, reordering supplies, paying for computing power, or subscribing to a data feed with no person in the loop. For most of the Internet’s history, buying something online meant a person clicking buttons and approving the final payment- that step is now being removed.

Agentic commerce is beginning to move from a theoretical idea towards a practical part of the payments industry, although it remains at an early stage. The infrastructure is being laid well ahead of any meaningful transaction volume. Over the past several weeks, three companies that sit at the centre of online payments – Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe – have each made a notable move to prepare for agentic commerce. Taken singularly, these look like three separate events. Taken together, they point to a convergence not only over who processes agentic payments, but in what instrument those payments will be made.

Stripe: A Shared Language for Machines to Pay

The first initiative was put in place by Stripe earlier this year, with the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP); an open, HTTP-native standard for agent-to-agent and agent-to-service payments. Stripe co-authored the protocol with Tempo; a payments-focused L1 blockchain co-developed with Paradigm. MPP was launched in March 2026; shipping alongside Tempo’s Mainnet launch. The problem addressed by MPP is that the current payment system was built for people. To buy something, an agent would normally have to create an account, read a pricing page, pick a plan, type in card details, and set up billing; aspects that all require human approval. MPP replaces this with a direct exchange, by standardising the HTTP 402 ‘Payment Required’ status code with a Challenge-Credential-Receipt flow. The agent hits a paid endpoint, and the server then returns a payment challenge listing price/methods/cadence/metadata. The agent then authorises, retries with a credential, and receives the resource plus a receipt. For businesses and merchants already using Stripe, these payments appear in the same dashboard, settle in the same balance, and follow the same reporting as any ordinary sale.

MPP differs its method from Coinbase’s x402 ‘one-shot’ approach by wrapping the HTTP 402 handshake in a multi-method, lifecycle-aware envelope; extending one-shot calls into recurring subscriptions, and streaming usage, cancellation, and reconciliation. Notably, Stripe backs both the MPP and x402 as part of its wider agentic commerce stack, which also spans the Agentic Commerce Suite, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP). Stripe is hedging across protocols, rather than betting on one. 

Figure 1: Cumulative MPP Transactions (Adjusted), 2026 

Source: Artemis Analytics

Figure 1 shows the cumulative series of MPP transactions; rising steeply on the day of its initial launch, March 18th. This is where integrators, testers, and early developers began experimenting with and using the protocol. Since then, the number of transactions has been steadily increasing. A near-linear cumulative line translates to consistent daily volume, which, for a young protocol, is a bullish read.

Mastercard: Settlement for Payments That Never Stop

In June 2026, Mastercard launched its Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M); a new service that will allow agentic transactions to be permissioned, orchestrated, and settled at machine speed across its global payments network. Its existing Agent Pay programme, introduced in 2025, allows trusted agents to make normal purchases on a person’s behalf. AP4M is aimed at the constant, automatic, machine-to-machine payments that happen in the background. For example, an entrepreneur starting a new brick-and-mortar business may instruct an AI agent to build and launch its digital presence. The agent will then create a list of tasks it needs to complete, such as buying a domain name and hosting service, copying text and images, or integrating commerce - all within a defined budget. This turns a human-initiated request into a chain of transactions executed automatically across providers. To support this, AP4M gives every agent a verified credential, allows businesses to set spending rules that are enforced automatically, and guarantees settlement across several payment types, including cards, bank accounts, and stablecoins. 

Figure 2: Mastercard’s AP4M Flow

Source: Mastercard

This is all in preparation for a future where Mastercard and its partners envision businesses that create services for AI agents. This shift could unlock a wave of innovation, business models. and economic activity, where any company - big or small - can become a supplier for agentic demands. Mastercard’s Chief Product Officer, Jorn Lambert, said the services could create the conditions for a “superbloom of AI business models”, with the launch of AP4M garnering more than 30 partners signed on at the start. This spans payment processors such as Adyen and Checkout.com, infrastructure providers including Cloudflare, and a long list of stablecoin and blockchain firms. Notably, Tempo, Stripe’s partner on MPP, is among the list; working with Mastercard to make the two systems compatible. 

Visa: The Data Behind the Stablecoin Case

Visa’s contribution, published in mid-July in collaboration with Artemis Analytics, provides an argument backed by evidence supporting the case for agentic commerce. In the joint report, titled ‘Agentic Payments from the Ground Up’, Visa separates agentic commerce into two kinds. The first is macro commerce: an agent acting for a person on typical-sized purchases such as booking a flight. The second is micro commerce: tiny, frequent payments, often under a dollar, for items such as a single data query or a slice of computing power. 

The report’s central finding is that these small payments break the economics of card networks. A card transaction carries a fixed cost of a few cents, at minimum. On payments worth a fraction of a penny, the fixed cost can be larger than the payment itself; so, cards cannot serve these payments profitably. On the other hand, Stablecoins - which settle for a fraction of a cent on newer blockchains - can. This is evident in the data: x402, which originated at Coinbase and Cloudflare, has handled roughly $15 million across 109.6 million transactions since May 2025 ($0.14 per transaction). Stripe’s MPP, released in March 2026, has settled approximately $25,000 across almost 115,000 transactions in its first weeks ($0.22 per transaction). Whilst these average transaction values exceed the stated ‘fraction of a penny’, it is important to note that these figures are a blended average inflated by larger transactions, testing, and dummy transactions.

Visa is careful not to declare any winners in the report. Its stated conclusion is that both cards and stablecoins will have a place. What matters is that Visa is now putting its own data behind the case for stablecoins in the part of the market it expects to grow fastest.

Why this Connects to Open USD

In June 2026, a consortium of more than 140 companies, called the Open Standard, announced Open USD (OUSD); a shared stablecoin governed by an independent body, rather than a single issuer. The founding partners include Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe – the same three names mentioned above – alongside BlackRock, Coinbase, Standard Chartered, and others. What makes OUSD different from the likes of Tether’s USDT, or Circle’s USDC, is that businesses can create and redeem OUSD with no fees or volume limits, and nearly all of the reserve income is handed back to the partners that use it, rather than kept by an issuer. Stripe intends to make OUSD the default stablecoin across its commerce platform. 

Placed next to the agentic launches, OUSD reads less like a coincidence and more like the other half of the same plan. If machine payments run on stablecoins, and the networks are building the rails on which those payments run, then owning the stablecoin settlement layer decides who collects the float on what could be an enormous volume of activity. Building the rails and issuing the asset are two moves toward one position. The agentic commerce push gives OUSD a valid use case. 

What to Watch

The clearest signal from these announcements is the convergence of products and services, rather than a simple coincidence. Stripe’s MPP, Mastercard’s AP4M, and Visa’s Artemis Report each put forward the same underlying thesis – that agentic commerce will settle in stablecoins. Furthermore, each of these names sits behind Open USD; aligning with a greater strategic objective of owning both the rails and the settlement asset used for agentic transactions. What opens the door for this thesis is that payment cards carry friction that restricts the efficiency garnered from agentic commerce; leaving the micro tier structurally unprofitable to serve at scale with traditional means. The logic becomes clearer when the pieces are read together: the building of settlement infrastructure (MPP, AP4M) and issuing the stablecoin (OUSD) are potentially two halves of one move. At the same time, the vendors are remaining hedged. Stripe supports both MPP and x402, while Tempo bridges MPP into Mastercard’s network. What is clear is that, as yet, no single standard has won. Until the market converges around a common approach, fragmentation risks constraining the very growth that agentic commerce is meant to unlock.