TLDR Tech / Crypto
Payments Giants Build Agent Rails; But They're Walled Gardens
Visa, Mastercard, OpenAI+Stripe, Google, Amazon, and PayPal have all launched centralized, permissioned agent payment systems for delegated shopping. However, the rails are siloed as they require Visa tokens, Mastercard credentials, and Stripe flows. They work for human checkout and break down for agent-to-agent use cases like paying compute, API access, or realtime data fees. The real unlock is permissionless, programmable machine-to-machine rails.
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