Who funds the agents?
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Who funds the agents?
McKinsey predicts that AI agents will facilitate $3–5 trillion in global consumer commercial transactions by 2030.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Prathik Desai
Translated by Block Unicorn
In March this year, OpenAI shut down a feature that allowed AI agents to shop on users’ behalf. Within just five months of its launch, fewer than 30 Shopify merchants had used it. The payment infrastructure itself was not the issue—the problem lay in the absence of rules ensuring a smooth shopping experience. Which products could agents purchase? Who would collect sales tax? How would fraud be detected? Who would handle returns? None of these questions had been adequately addressed.
Providing wallets or building payment infrastructure for agents is relatively straightforward. But enabling individuals or enterprises to spend via agents in a trusted and regulated manner is far more difficult. Only programmability and clear rules can ensure a trustworthy environment. This governance gap represents an opportunity for the agent economy.
Last year, AI agents processed 176 million transactions totaling $73 million. While this figure may seem trivial today, McKinsey forecasts that by 2030, AI agents will facilitate $3–5 trillion in global consumer commerce transactions.
Companies building this economic system are racing to control the governance layer—including spending controls, identity verification, and policy enforcement—which determines which agents are authorized to manage budgets.
Today, we’ll examine who is building the banking layer for robots—and what advantages those dominating that layer stand to gain.
Why a Multi-Layer Architecture?
The economics of processing agent payments are extremely thin. Over the past 12 months, the average AI agent payment amounted to just $0.31.
Consider how little profit remains from a $0.31 transaction after passing through multiple backend layers. Stripe’s standard pricing—2.9% plus a $0.30 fixed fee—leaves merchants with less than one-tenth of a cent. Visa’s interchange fee consumes another third. By contrast, Layer-2 stablecoin payment systems process the same transaction for just $0.0001.
These economic realities justify cryptocurrency’s role at the settlement layer.
Payment infrastructure at the settlement layer is largely mature. Coinbase’s x402 protocol handled the vast majority of last year’s 176 million agent transactions, and approximately 3,900 merchants now accept agent payments. Stripe and Tempo jointly developed a competing protocol—the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP)—launched in March and integrated with over 100 services. Google, Visa, and Mastercard also rolled out agent payment products around the same time. That means five competing payment architectures have emerged within just 12 months.
But the challenge with agent payments is that no one gets rich processing $0.31 transactions. So value concentrates in the funds in motion—and in enforcing the rules governing how agents spend.
Last week, we explained how enterprises capture value by owning the wallet layer that holds AI agents’ stablecoin balances. Yet floating balances represent only one of several valuable layers. Another is the layer of rules governing how those floating balances may be used.
These rules include spending controls, agent identity verification, policy enforcement, audit trails, and liability assignment when transactions fail. This layer remains wide open.
In April this year, American Express launched its “Agent Purchase Protection” insurance product—designed to cover losses incurred by AI agents making erroneous purchases. This move effectively acknowledges the current state of governance in the AI agent space. In an industry projected to reach $3–5 trillion within five years, solving the governance gap presents enormous value.
That’s why incumbent policymakers are now rushing to seize control of the governance layer.
But on which layer should this governance layer be built? It could reside in banks, developer APIs—or even wallets.
Wallets as the Governance Layer
Every agent purchase must pass through a wallet. Therefore, wallets represent the optimal entry point for implementing spending limits, identity verification, and manual approvals. Once you control the wallet, you control the flow. Payment infrastructure company Stripe recognized this early.
In June 2025, Stripe acquired Privy—a company building embedded wallets for consumer crypto applications. Through this acquisition, Stripe gained access to 75 million wallets distributed across more than 1,000 development teams. These wallets now sit at a critical chokepoint in the money flow—where all policies, spending limits, and manual approvals must be enforced before funds move.
Stripe has also built out a full-stack agent payment technology suite. It acquired Bridge to handle stablecoin orchestration and fiat conversion. It also partnered with Paradigm to incubate Tempo—a Layer-1 blockchain focused on payments. Stripe and Tempo co-authored the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP), an open standard specifying how agents request, authorize, and settle payments.
Stripe’s agent-ready financial solution now supports software-initiated balance queries, bill payments, fund storage, virtual card creation, and transfers. Agents execute routine payments autonomously—but any action outside their defined policy boundaries triggers human review. Balances are held in non-custodial Privy wallets spanning over 150 markets.
Even Amazon—faced with the need to let its developers grant AI agents spending capabilities—chose two wallet providers: Privy and Coinbase. Not seasoned financial institutions like banks or card networks—but a five-year-old wallet provider.
That’s because wallets serve as ideal checkpoints, enabling precisely calibrated human intervention to ensure necessary checks and balances.
In its report “Who Pays the Agent?”, Keyrock observes that the agent commerce market will “converge toward equilibrium—agents enjoy significant autonomy, but operate strictly within cryptographically enforced boundaries that humans can audit and revoke.”
This is exactly where Privy sits within Stripe’s tech stack: the wallet sets the boundaries within which agents must operate.
Here’s how governance policies function on this tech stack.
Privy offers two smart wallet models. In the first model, the agent fully controls the wallet and executes transactions autonomously within predefined policy constraints—requiring no manual approval. This model suits fully autonomous agents like trading bots and portfolio managers. In the second model, users retain ownership of the wallet but grant the agent limited permissions to act as a signer. Users can revoke access at any time.
Stripe’s MPP follows a similar governance philosophy.
MPP introduces a feature called “sessions” for high-frequency agent tasks. In session mode, agents pre-authorize a spending budget and then make repeated payments within that limit—without needing separate on-chain requests for each transaction. MPP has already achieved sub-cent billing for LLM inference and per-query billing for data APIs.
This level of governance granularity is something card networks cannot support.
Vertical Stack Expansion
Although Coinbase’s x402 currently leads in AI agent payments, Privy’s advantage lies less in cryptocurrency itself—and more in the distribution moat it built via Stripe.
Coinbase counts 3,900 merchants accepting agent payments. Stripe, meanwhile, serves roughly 1,000 such merchants. In February this year, Privy stated that if all Stripe merchants adopted machine payments, agent commerce could scale immediately via Privy wallets—without requiring merchants to build custom crypto infrastructure.
The competition between Coinbase and Stripe is intensifying—and other traditional giants have joined the race for vertical expansion, seeking growth across the entire tech stack.
Keyrock mapped 179 projects across six layers of the agent payment stack: settlement, wallet, routing, protocol, governance, and application.
Both Coinbase and Stripe cover five of these six layers. Circle covers four. Despite their scale, Google covers only two layers—and Visa just one.
Over the past 12 months, incumbent payment giants have spent over $8 billion to fill gaps in their own tech stacks. Capital One acquired AI-native software platform Brex for $5.15 billion. Mastercard acquired BVNK for $1.8 billion. Wallet and AI software layers attracted the most active acquisition activity: Stripe bought Privy; Fireblocks acquired Dynamic; Arbitrum acquired ZeroDev. In each case, a payment infrastructure provider acquired an independent wallet provider.
Collectively, these deals signal that the market has identified a scarce resource layer. Settlement fees have become cheap and interchangeable—but programmatic permissions, budgets, and accountability are where value resides.
Vertical integration across multiple layers also creates compounding effects.
Whoever owns this checkpoint can set spending rules, intercept funds before they move, determine which merchants, agents, and applications receive trusted access—and charge fees to make it all happen. We see this dynamic clearly in the Privy-Stripe distribution moat.
Even Coinbase’s positioning reflects this logic. Every x402 payment generates USDC demand on its Layer-2 Base chain—yielding float income. This income funds more agent tools via AgentKit, which embeds session caps, per-transaction limits, and allowlists—restricting transfers to audited contracts. The more agents on AgentKit, the more x402 payments occur. Each layer reinforces the others.
Incumbent enterprises are far more active investors.
Coinbase Ventures has invested in Catena Labs, Skyfire, and Payman—the three most prominent independent governance startups today. Circle co-founder Sean Neville founded Catena, and Circle also invested in Skyfire. a16z led funding rounds for both companies. Visa backs Payman and partners with Skyfire.
The same firms building payment settlement infrastructure are now funding the governance layer. Their thesis is simple: if governance functionality—like Privy’s two models—remains embedded within existing infrastructure, incumbents maximize their returns. If governance becomes a standalone layer, they profit through their portfolios.
What Does Controlling the Governance Layer Mean?
Payment processing has never been the most valuable role—because financial systems inevitably commoditize. Once that happens, profits shift to those who decide whether transactions are permitted—and under what conditions.
Historically, many industries have undergone identical commoditization cycles.
Consider what happened after the internet commoditized cable TV. All Internet Service Providers (ISPs) became nearly indistinguishable and interchangeable. Telecom companies were forced into vertical expansion to remain competitive.
India’s two largest telecom operators—Jio and Airtel—began bundling hundreds of TV channels, subscriptions to six OTT platforms, unlimited voice calls, set-top boxes, and free routers into single broadband packages. Similarly, AT&T acquired Time Warner for $85 billion—becoming a media-and-telecom conglomerate. Its goal? To combine Time Warner’s premium content—HBO, Warner Bros., CNN—with AT&T’s massive distribution network to compete head-on with streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon.
When broadband connectivity—the foundational infrastructure—became the least valuable part of the package, value migrated to the most compelling combination of content, relationships, and offers.
We’re seeing the same pattern in crypto.
Settlement was originally meant to occur at the protocol level. Imagine Ethereum as a shared ledger where everyone settles. After Coinbase launched Base—a faster, less congested Layer-2 chain—it began charging gas fees on every transaction settled on its proprietary chain. Today, Coinbase earns roughly $60 million annually in sequencer revenue from Base-based transactions.
Participants building agent payment systems have learned from this.
In our book *Active Buoys*, we explained how to construct an economic system by controlling the stablecoin balances agents hold between transactions. This enables companies controlling the wallet layer of the tech stack to expand their revenue streams.
The governance layer adds another—and potentially larger—revenue stream.
Visa processes $14.2 trillion in annual payment volume—and earns a 0.28% fee. This rate isn’t just a transaction fee—it implicitly includes a governance premium for Visa’s trust-building functions: fraud prevention, dispute resolution, and network rule enforcement.
Applying even a fraction of that rate to agent transactions reveals the massive value awaiting companies built atop the governance layer. McKinsey forecasts $3 trillion in agent transaction volume by 2030. At just a 0.1% governance fee—about 35% of Visa’s rate—that would generate $3 billion in annual revenue. For context, Coinbase’s total subscription and services revenue in 2025 was approximately $2.8 billion. Governance-layer revenue from agent transactions alone would rival Coinbase’s combined income from staking, custody, and Coinbase One.
Companies operating across the wallet, settlement, and governance layers of the agent finance stack profit from idle agent balances (float income), settlement fees (per-transaction sequencer revenue), and compliance fees (governance enforcement).
That’s why vertical integration across the entire tech stack will be the only viable business model for remaining competitive in the agent era.
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