Google and PayPal Executives: Crypto Payments Will Become the Foundational Infrastructure for Future Commerce

Odaily News Executives from PayPal and Google Cloud stated that in the future, commerce driven by AI Agents will operate on crypto payment rails, as AI Agents cannot use traditional bank accounts like humans.

Richard Widmann, Head of Web3 Strategy at Google Cloud, stated that AI Agents are unable to open bank accounts from both a technical and regulatory standpoint, while cryptocurrencies offer an "excellent machine-readable payment interface." He revealed that Google has launched the open-source Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2) and donated it to the FIDO Foundation, with over 120 partners, including PayPal, already joining.

May Zabaneh, Senior Vice President of Crypto at PayPal, indicated that the company views AI Agents as the next generation of commerce entry point following offline, online, and mobile payments. She noted that PYUSD, as PayPal's stablecoin, provides a naturally programmable payment layer for AI-native payments and global transactions.

A PayPal survey shows that 95% of merchant websites currently see traffic from AI Agents, but only about 20% of merchants have machine-readable product catalogs. Zabaneh believes that merchants need to adapt to the AI Agent era as quickly as possible, or they will miss out on the next wave of commercial infrastructure upgrades.

Additionally, the two also discussed the security and responsibility issues of AI Agents. Widmann stated that multi-party custody will become an important solution for Agent fund management. AI Agents should not have full control over private keys but should only hold a portion of the key fragments to reduce financial risk. (CoinDesk)