What to know : AI agents are structurally locked out of traditional bank accounts, leaving crypto rails as the natural payments layer. Google has launched the Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2), with 120 partners including PayPal, and donated it to the FIDO Foundation. A PayPal survey found 95% of merchants see AI agent traffic but only 20% have machine-readable catalogs.
MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Senior figures from Google Cloud and PayPal told CoinDesk's Consensus Miami conference on Thursday that the next wave of internet commerce will run on crypto rails because AI agents structurally cannot use traditional financial accounts.
Richard Widmann, global head of Web3 strategy at Google Cloud, said the existing internet user experience does not extend to autonomous agents.
"An agent cannot get a bank account. It's not hard, it just is impossible," he said, citing technological and regulatory barriers. Crypto, by contrast, is "a fantastic machine readable interface for payments," Widmann said.
To address the gap, Google has launched the Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2), an open protocol that has been donated to the FIDO Foundation and has more than 120 partners including PayPal, Widmann said. He compared the move to the x402 internet-native payment standard given to the Linux Foundation.
"Open dialogues and open standards are really the foundation you need to build on," Widmann said.
May Zabaneh, senior vice president and general manager of crypto at PayPal, said the company is treating agents as the next channel after PayPal's evolution from offline to online to mobile commerce. PYUSD, the company's stablecoin, is "a very natural programmable layer for payments," she said, particularly as commerce trends toward globalization, AI-native experiences and tokenized assets.
Zabaneh cited a recent PayPal survey which found that 95% of merchants now see AI agent traffic on their sites, but only 20% have machine-readable catalogs. "Merchants need to be ready for this next era," she said. The shift, she added, mirrors the move from offline to online stores; merchants need to expose their products in agent-readable formats.
On liability, Zabaneh said the question of who's responsible if an agent makes a bad purchase is "definitely something that we have to think through as an industry." Widmann said multi-party custody is becoming central to agent design. Google has extended its Cloud KMS platform to cryptocurrency custody, and Widmann argued that an agent should hold only one of two or three key shards rather than the full private key. "It cannot simply unilaterally move funds or take action," he said.
Asked what keeps them up at night, Widmann said the open question is "how do you onboard agents into all of the existing capital markets and infrastructure plumbing that powers payments and trading today." Zabaneh said trust keeps her up professionally, though personally she "can't wait for agentic to help make my life easier."
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