AI Agents Credit: Canva AI is already changing how people find and buy things online, comparing prices, narrowing down options, doing in seconds what used to take an afternoon of tabs open. An AI agent could find a flight that fits your schedule, for example. Giving it permission to actually buy the ticket is a more complicated problem. That is because most payment systems were built around people.
Someone enters their card details, signs into an account, clicks approve. If software is going to complete more tasks on their own, they will also need a way to pay without stopping to ask permission every time. There are signs this could become a much bigger part of how software works. Gartner expects agentic AI to be built into 33% of enterprise software applications by 2028, up from less than 1% in 2024.
McKinsey estimates that AI agents could mediate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global consumer commerce by 2030. How those agents actually pay is now becoming its own technology problem. Mastercard, Coinbase, and blockchain networks, including XDC, are among those trying to solve it. When software needs to buy something Mastercard is preparing for the same possibility.
When it launched Agent Pay for Machines in June, the company described a future in which agents could continuously buy services from each other, including payments worth fractions of a cent. That is where XDC AI also comes in: by providing AI agents with the capability to find and pay for digital services on demand, rather relying on traditional human checkout flows, the platform allows software to programmatically handle micro-transactions in real time. “Every internet transaction so far has assumed a person is on the other end of it,” said Atul Khekade, co-founder of XDC Network. “AI Agents are breaking that assumption completely. If software is going to act on our behalf, it needs a way to pay for what it needs without waiting for someone to approve it every time.” Credit: XDC AI A user can give an agent access to a wallet and set a limit on how much it is allowed to spend. When the agent needs data from a paid API to finish the task, it can make the request and pay for it in USDC, with XDC covering the gas fee, so the agent does not also need to hold XDC to make the payment.
XDC Tech, the US institutional arm of XDC Network, has also integrated with Bridge, a Stripe company, helping to connect those onchain payments with more traditional financial infrastructure by giving developers access to infrastructure for moving between fiat currencies and stablecoins. An agent researching a market could need information from several paid data sources. Another might need access to a particular API or a small amount of computing power to finish a task. Instead of someone setting up a new account or subscription every time, the agent could find the service and pay only for what it needs.
An old part of the web finds a new use XDC is building this on x402, an open protocol developed by Coinbase. That resurrects HTTP 402, an old web status code meaning “Payment Required” that has existed for years without becoming widely used. An agent requests a paid API, the server responds with a price instead of the data, and the agent’s wallet pays automatically, no login, no card number, no human in the loop. XDC has built that flow into its own marketplace, where an agent can find an API, pay per use in USDC, and stay within whatever limit its owner set.
Adoption is still early, but x402 is beginning to attract some large names. The Linux Foundation now oversees the x402 Foundation, which has 40 members including Mastercard, Visa, Stripe, American Express, Google, AWS and Circle. That does not mean x402 has become a mainstream payment rail, but it gives the protocol considerably more institutional backing than it had when Coinbase first introduced it. That is a major reason why the infrastructure work matters more than the headlines right now.
Fully autonomous shopping is still limited, and AI is much further along at helping people compare options than at completing purchases on its own. But the direction is clear, and XDC is betting that when agents do start paying their own way, they will need rails built for machine speed rather than human checkout, cents instead of dollars, and thousands of transactions instead of one. The gap between x402’s onchain activity and its ecosystem valuation is a reminder that infrastructure and adoption rarely move at the same pace. What is being built is real, the settlement rails, the wallet permissions, and integrations with players like Bridge, but the volume moving through them today is still a fraction of what the numbers around this space suggest.
For now, AI remains far better at helping people decide what to buy than at completing the purchase itself. That is where the real contest is playing out. Card networks are wagering that trust and identity, the problem they have spent decades solving for humans, will matter just as much for machines. Networks built for stablecoin settlement, XDC among them, are wagering the opposite: that speed and near-zero fees will define this market once agents start transacting at scale.
In the end, the better approach will probably come down to the use case. But what is certain is that the infrastructure decisions being made now, by companies like Mastercard and XDC, will shape how autonomous commerce actually works once it arrives. Contributed article. Not produced by the TNW newsroom and does not reflect the editorial stance of TNW.
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