Mastercard launches AI agent payment protocol: provides on-chain record permissions, initially integrating with Polygon

According to Fortune, Mastercard has announced a new protocol called Agent Pay for AI, allowing AI agents to make payments and conduct small transfers among themselves— for example, automatically paying when an AI agent retrieves data from a website in segments. The protocol stores the permissions granted to AI agents by humans on the blockchain, initially using the Polygon network to ensure transparency and verifiability, allowing multiple parties to verify whether the agents are acting as instructed.

Companies like Adyen, Coinbase, and Cloudflare are collaborating with Mastercard to develop this protocol. Mastercard's Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert stated that this protocol will not become a major source of revenue in the short term, but it is expected to develop into a significant new market over the next five years.

Giants like Visa, Stripe, Coinbase, and Google are actively laying out AI payment protocols, jointly promoting the future of "machine-to-machine payments" and AI chatbots dominating e-commerce transactions; however, the current volume of agent-based payments remains relatively small.