Agentic commerce will run on crypto rails, PayPal and Google reps tell Consensus Miami

Senior figures from PayPal and Google Cloud said open payment protocols, machine-readable merchant catalogs and multi-party crypto custody are needed to scale agentic commerce. 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.