Galaxy: On-Chain Infrastructure, the Core of the Next-Generation Agent Payment Race

Author: Lucas Tcheyan, Galaxy Digital Research Associate; Source: Galaxy; Translation: Golden Finance

Last week, AI Agents in the payment sector saw intense activity. Leading fintech, cloud infrastructure, and crypto companies are all making moves, and this track is rapidly becoming one of the most decisive competitive focuses in the payments industry.

Stripe and Paradigm jointly launched Tempo, a Layer 1 public chain focused on payments, officially going live on the mainnet, alongside the release of the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP). This is a new open standard for machine-to-machine payments, directly competing with Coinbase’s x402. Amazon Web Services (AWS) published a detailed white paper explaining how to integrate x402 into its financial services cloud infrastructure. Visa Crypto Labs released its first experimental product—a command-line interface (CLI) allowing AI Agents to perform credit card payments directly from the terminal in a programmatic way. Additionally, Coinbase is reportedly in talks with Cloudflare to develop a stablecoin specifically designed for AI Agent transactions; if successful, crypto payments could be embedded into the underlying infrastructure that covers about 20% of global internet traffic.

Currently, on-chain AI Agent payment patterns are taking shape around two emerging standards, both based on the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code: one is the x402 protocol, which we introduced in January; the other is the MPP launched by Stripe and Tempo. Both are open-source protocols and address the same core issues: how AI Agents complete payments and how merchants verify receipt of payment. A notable difference is that MPP natively supports streaming payments via state channels, allowing agents to pre-authorize spending limits and make continuous payments during a session. Both protocols are cross-chain compatible (though initially launched on the public chains of their respective developers); as open-source protocols, they can also be deployed on other blockchains (for example, x402 has already seen significant transaction volume on Solana, and an adapted version for Solana was released just hours after MPP).

Moreover, Mastercard announced the acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK for $1.8 billion, marking the largest stablecoin M&A to date, aiming to connect on-chain payment channels with its global payment network covering over 130 countries. While this deal’s scope extends beyond AI Agent payments, it highlights how traditional payment institutions are actively integrating stablecoin infrastructure into their core systems.

Our Perspective

Last week’s most notable development wasn’t a single announcement but rather the collective acceleration of giants like Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Amazon, and Coinbase, all pushing toward a future where AI Agents are central transaction parties and crypto technology becomes standard.

In our previous reports on x402 and AI Agent capital markets, we have been tracking this native crypto logic: AI Agents cannot open bank accounts or complete KYC, so they need payment infrastructure that matches their operational speed, and stablecoins perfectly solve these two major issues—low fees make small payments feasible, transactions settle instantly, and once verified, there’s no risk of chargeback or reversal. Amazon building enterprise-grade reference architectures around x402, and Coinbase potentially embedding stablecoin payments into Cloudflare’s infrastructure, are strong confirmations: on-chain infrastructure will become a vital platform for the AI Agent economy.

Credit card payments will not disappear—in consumer-facing e-commerce scenarios where chargeback protection is critical, credit cards still hold advantages; and traditional payment networks have the most entrenched barriers in the payment space: a distribution network covering billions of cards and millions of merchants. But a more indicative signal is the industry giants’ strategic bets. Tempo’s design partners read like a global financial all-star lineup: Visa, Mastercard, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Standard Chartered, Nubank, Revolut, Klarna, Shopify, as well as Anthropic and OpenAI. These institutions are shaping the future of global payments and are actively involved in building a native stablecoin blockchain. Traditional giants are not just defending their positions—they are actively pushing their clients onto the blockchain.

Many key issues remain unresolved in the industry. Identity verification is one of the most critical: if AI Agents are to conduct autonomous large-scale transactions, platforms need to verify that the underlying actions are backed by real human entities. Sam Altman’s identity project, World, launched the AgentKit toolkit this week, taking a step in this direction—allowing agents to carry cryptographic proofs confirming they are supported by verified humans, and enabling direct integration with x402. In a world dominated by autonomous agents, fraud prevention, spending limits, and dispute resolution mechanisms are still largely uncharted territory.

Over the past two years, the core trend in crypto has been integration with traditional finance: ETF listings, stablecoin adoption, and rapid asset tokenization. But recent developments indicate that this trend of integration is extending into payment infrastructure, making stablecoins and blockchain channels central to the next-generation payment systems. The AI Agent economy may become the most influential arena in this ongoing convergence.