Introduction

In our recent article, Why AI Agents Need Identity and Wallets, we explored why intelligent agents need verifiable credentials and programmable wallets to stay accountable. Now the idea expands into a bigger frontier: a world where the internet becomes an economic system driven not by human intervention, but by AI agents acting on behalf of people, organisations, and other agents.

To make this future work, the agentic internet needs a money layer built for agents.

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The Rise of Agentic Commerce

An internet is emerging where AI agents negotiate deals, buy services, evaluate suppliers, run business functions, and even collaborate on projects, without waiting for human approval. The global market for AI agents is already valued at roughly $7 billion and is projected to surge to $93 billion by 2032. What’s powering this is liquidity.

For these agents to operate effectively, they need the ability to pay for data, compute power, APIs, and shared profits during collaborations. They need to move value at speeds human-driven systems can’t match. And they need to do it securely, transparently, and automatically.

Stablecoins, now a $300 billion asset class, have quickly become the preferred currency for these emerging machine-to-machine transactions. On many days, they process more value than Visa. But even with their scale, today’s payment rails, ACH transfers, slow bank systems, high-fee card networks, collapse under the pressure of agents executing thousands of micropayments per second. This is why a new money layer is becoming essential. One where value moves as fast as information.

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What the Agentic Internet Really Looks Like

Right now, most people still experience the internet as a place where humans click, type, scroll, and occasionally argue. But the emerging agentic internet shifts this model completely. Instead of humans making every decision, teams of AI agents can act autonomously, coordinate with one another, and execute tasks from start to finish.

A Forbes analysis describes this future as a “self-driving economy,” where agents optimise anything from supply chains to healthcare approvals. The World Economic Forum frames it as a “cognitive era,” where organisations learn and adapt like living systems. But all this potential hits a wall if agents can't transact freely.

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Where Legacy Payments Fall Apart

Our existing financial infrastructure was never built for autonomous machine-to-machine money movement. Visa’s throughput caps at 65,000 transactions per second under ideal conditions. Bank transfers can take days. Cross-border wires suffer from delays and painful FX fees. Crypto networks, though promising, still choke under congestion, Ethereum gas spikes have pushed stablecoin transfers to $10 each.

For AI agents that operate in minutes, seconds, even milliseconds, this is fatal. Arbitrage opportunities vanish instantly. Micro-payments become impossible when 2% card fees eat a $0.01 transaction. A report from NACM estimates that without a fix, trillions of dollars in productivity could be lost.

The agent economy simply cannot run on rails designed for weekend batch settlements.

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Building a Native Money Layer

A true money layer for agents must work the way TCP/IP works for the internet: invisible, fast, interoperable, and programmable. The foundations are emerging.

x402, created by Coinbase and expanded through the x402 Foundation with Cloudflare, turns ordinary HTTP requests into payment instructions. Agents can embed a small fee, say $0.02, directly in a request header to buy priority compute or data access. Transactions settle instantly in stablecoins, with no accounts or manual approvals.

AP2, Google’s Agent Payments Protocol, sets a shared standard for how agents handle payments with merchants, verify identities, and resolve disputes. With PayPal now supporting it, AP2 bridges the traditional commerce world with the new autonomous one.

Interledger Protocol (ILP) brings the interoperability piece. It routes value the way the internet routes packets, across ledgers, across currencies, across borders. ILP connectors move funds atomically from a stablecoin network to a bank network to a mobile wallet, often with sub-cent fees and high throughput. Interledger pilots this year, such as Chimoney’s prototype, show how agent swarms can settle transactions fluidly across systems that historically never spoke to each other.

Around these protocols sits the programmable wallet layer: smart, rule-based wallets that can release funds only once proof-of-work, proof-of-compute, or other verifiable outcomes are met. The result is an economy where payments aren’t just fast but are conditional, traceable, and enforceable.

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Securing the Flows: Identity, Payments, Verification

Speed without safety is chaos, so a secure money layer depends on what many teams now call the “trust triad.” Identity establishes who or what is acting, using standards like decentralised identifiers with dynamic reputation scores.

Payments carry intent through programmable conditions built into tools like x402, with ILP ensuring atomic and interoperable delivery.

Verification confirms that the action actually happened. Human-in-the-loop oracles, on-chain proofs, and systems such as action-as-proof (A2P) ensure that agents can earn trust through repeated, validated performance.

Together, the triad stops fraud, assigns responsibility, and ensures compliance in a world where machines negotiate money.

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The Momentum

The shift toward an agentic economy is moving quickly and visibly. Startups focused on agent payments have already raised significant funding this year, signalling strong conviction from investors.

Large enterprises, including Oracle and Google, are rolling out their own agent frameworks and experimenting with autonomous decision-making inside critical business workflows. Payment companies are beginning to test stablecoin-powered agent transactions, while Interledger continues to demonstrate that global, programmable settlement between different ledgers is not only possible but increasingly practical. Coinbase’s x402 protocol is also gaining widespread early adoption as developers integrate seamless, agent-to-agent payments into real applications.

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What Comes Next

Analysts estimate that autonomous agents could unlock more than $4 trillion in value across commerce, logistics, research, digital trade, and operational workflows. Yet this transformation cannot unfold without a money layer designed specifically for autonomous agents rather than human operators.

Stablecoins supply the liquidity that enables agents to move value instantly. Protocols such as x402 and AP2 define the transactional language agents rely on to negotiate, settle, and reimburse each other seamlessly. Interledger ensures interoperability across diverse payment networks, allowing value to flow as freely as information. Programmable wallets embed the rules, governance, and conditions that make these transactions secure, compliant, and verifiable. The remaining progress depends on builders, startups innovating at the edge, enterprises integrating real-world systems, and developers experimenting with new agentic architectures.

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We are building this money layer at Chimoney, one that moves as fast as AI agents, scales across networks, and ensures every transaction is secure and accountable. We’re creating the first digital passport and payment infrastructure for the agentic internet, laying the foundation for autonomous commerce at unprecedented speed and scale.

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