PayPal and Google Cloud say AI agents can't get bank accounts, making crypto the only viable payment rail. Yet 95% of merchants see agent traffic, only 20% have machine-readable catalogs, and liability questions remain.
Senior executives 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 open bank accounts. The statements frame a risk event for merchants and payment processors: adapt to machine-readable, crypto-native infrastructure or lose access to a growing volume of agent-driven traffic. The immediate consequence is a widening gap between the volume of AI agent activity hitting merchant sites and the backend readiness to serve it, a gap that could accelerate stablecoin adoption while exposing firms that delay.
Richard Widmann, global head of Web3 strategy at Google Cloud, drew a hard line between the existing internet user experience and what autonomous agents require. The friction is not a matter of difficulty but of structural impossibility.
Crypto, by contrast, is "a fantastic machine readable interface for payments," Widmann said. The distinction matters because agents need to discover, negotiate, and settle transactions without human intervention. A bank account, with its KYC requirements, human identity anchor, and batch-based settlement, cannot be opened or operated by software alone. A crypto wallet, controlled by a private key, can. That makes stablecoins and on-chain settlement the default path for any commerce where the buyer is an AI agent rather than a person.
To address the infrastructure gap, Google has built and donated the Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2) to the FIDO Foundation. Widmann said the open protocol already has more than 120 partners, including PayPal. He compared the move to the x402 internet-native payment standard given to the Linux Foundation, signaling an intent to create a shared, royalty-free layer that any merchant or wallet can implement.
"Open dialogues and open standards are really the foundation you need to build on," Widmann said.
The AP2 donation is a concrete step toward standardizing how agents request, authorize, and settle payments. For traders, the partner count is an early adoption signal. A protocol with 120 partners at launch reduces the risk that agentic commerce fragments across incompatible closed systems. It also increases the probability that the settlement layer will be on-chain, because the protocol is designed for machine-readable value transfer, not for retrofitting legacy payment rails.
May Zabaneh, senior vice president and general manager of crypto at PayPal, positioned the company's PYUSD stablecoin as the programmable layer for this shift. She described agents as the next channel in PayPal's evolution from offline to online to mobile commerce. PYUSD, she said, is "a very natural programmable layer for payments," particularly as commerce trends toward globalization, AI-native experiences, and tokenized assets.
Zabaneh cited a recent PayPal survey that exposes the readiness gap:
"Merchants need to be ready for this next era," she said, comparing the shift to the move from offline to online stores. Just as retailers had to build e-commerce storefronts, they now need to expose products in agent-readable formats. The 95% traffic figure suggests agents are already crawling merchant sites, scraping unstructured data, and attempting to transact. The 20% readiness figure suggests most of that traffic hits a dead end. That dead end is a risk for merchants losing sales and a catalyst for platforms that can bridge the gap.
Two unresolved risks could slow the agentic commerce rollout: liability and key custody. If an agent makes a bad purchase, who is responsible? Zabaneh said the question is "definitely something that we have to think through as an industry." No clear framework exists, and until one does, merchants and payment providers face chargeback, fraud, and compliance exposure that could limit their willingness to accept agent-initiated transactions.
Widmann pointed to multi-party custody as a design solution. 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. That architecture reduces the risk of a rogue agent draining a wallet, but it also adds complexity and latency. For traders, the pace at which multi-party custody standards are adopted will be a leading indicator of whether agentic commerce can scale without a catastrophic security event.
The risk event is not whether agents will attempt commerce–they already are–but whether the infrastructure and legal scaffolding will be ready before a high-profile failure freezes adoption. Several signposts would reduce the risk:
What would make the risk worse:
Widmann said the open question that keeps him up at night is "how do you onboard agents into all of the existing capital markets and infrastructure plumbing that powers payments and trading today." That plumbing was built for humans. Rebuilding it for agents is a multi-year project, and the assets most directly exposed to its success–stablecoins, smart contract platforms, and custody infrastructure tokens–will reprice as each milestone is met or missed.
The next concrete catalyst is likely a merchant pilot announcement from one of the 120 AP2 partners. Until then, the 95% traffic stat and the 20% readiness gap define the opportunity and the risk.
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