PayPal and Google Cloud Say Crypto Is Only Viable Payment Layer for AI Agent Economy

• AI agents cannot open bank accounts making crypto the only payment option.
• Google launched Agentic Payments Protocol AP2 with 120 partners globally.
• Only 20% of merchants have machine readable catalogs despite 95% seeing AI traffic.

AI agents can browse the web, negotiate services, and execute tasks autonomously. But they cannot open a bank account. Not because the process is difficult. Because it is structurally impossible under current technological and regulatory frameworks.

That single constraint, laid out at CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference, is reshaping how the technology industry thinks about the future of payments.

“An agent cannot get a bank account. It’s not hard, it just is impossible,” said Richard Widmann, global head of Web3 strategy at Google Cloud. Crypto, he argued, fills the gap naturally. It is a machine-readable interface that agents can use without human intermediaries, identity verification processes, or regulatory approvals designed for people.

Google’s Answer: An Open Protocol

Google has moved beyond identifying the problem. The company launched the Agentic Payments Protocol, known as AP2, an open standard designed to give AI agents a structured way to transact online. 

The protocol has already attracted more than 120 partners including PayPal and has been donated to the FIDO Foundation, the same body that oversees global authentication standards.

Widmann drew a comparison to x402, the internet-native payment standard recently contributed to the Linux Foundation by Coinbase. “Open dialogues and open standards are really the foundation you need to build on,” Widmann said.

PayPal Sees the Shift Coming

May Zabaneh, PayPal’s senior vice president and general manager of crypto, described AI agents as the next major commerce channel, following the company’s evolution from offline to online to mobile payments. PayPal’s stablecoin PYUSD, she said, is a natural programmable layer for this transition, particularly as commerce moves toward globalisation, AI-native experiences, and tokenised assets.

A recent PayPal survey illustrated just how unprepared the merchant ecosystem currently is. While 95% of merchants are already seeing AI agent traffic on their websites, only 20% have machine-readable product catalogs that agents can actually process and act on. “Merchants need to be ready for this next era,” Zabaneh said.

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The Liability and Custody Questions

Both executives acknowledged that agentic commerce raises serious unresolved questions.

If an AI agent makes a bad purchasing decision, determining who is responsible is a question the industry has not answered yet. “That is definitely something we have to think through as an industry,” she said.

On custody, Widmann outlined Google’s approach. The company has extended its Cloud KMS platform to cryptocurrency custody and argued that agents should hold only one shard of a multi-party private key rather than full control over funds. 

What Keeps Them Up at Night

Asked what concerns them most, both executives gave answers that reflected the scale of what is being built.

Widmann said the open question is how to integrate AI agents into the existing capital markets infrastructure and payment plumbing that powers global commerce today. Zabaneh said trust is her primary professional concern. Personally, she added, she cannot wait for agentic technology to simplify her own life.

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