MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — The next wave of internet commerce will run on a crypto rail because artificial intelligence agents are structurally unable to use traditional financial accounts, senior figures from Google Cloud and PayPal said Thursday at the CoinDesk Consensus Miami conference.
Richard Widmann, global head of Web3 strategy at Google Cloud, said existing Internet user experiences don’t extend to autonomous agents.
“Agents can’t get a bank account. It’s not difficult, it’s just impossible,” he said, citing technical and regulatory hurdles. Cryptocurrencies, by contrast, are “a great machine-readable payment interface,” Widman said.
Widmann said that to solve this problem, Google launched the Proxy Payment Protocol (AP2), an open protocol that has been donated to the FIDO Foundation and has more than 120 partners including PayPal. He compared the move to the x402 Internet-native payment standard given to the Linux Foundation.
“Open dialogue and open standards are really the foundation you need to build on,” Widman said.
May Zabaneh, senior vice president and general manager of crypto at PayPal, said the company is looking at agents as the next channel as PayPal evolves from offline to online to mobile commerce. The company’s stablecoin, PYUSD, is “a very natural programmable payments layer,” she said, especially as business trends move towards globalization, AI-native experiences and tokenized assets.
Zabaneh cited a recent PayPal survey that found that 95% of merchants now see AI agent traffic on their sites, but only 20% have a machine-readable directory. “Businesspeople need to be ready for the next era,” she said. The shift reflects the shift from offline to online stores, she added. Merchants need to expose their products in a format readable by agents.
Regarding liability, Zabane said the question of who is responsible if an agent makes a wrong purchase is “definitely something our industry as a whole has to think about.” Widman said multi-escrow is becoming central to agency design. Google has expanded its Cloud KMS platform into cryptocurrency custody, and Widmann believes agents should only hold one of two or three key shards, rather than the full private key. “It cannot simply move funds or take action unilaterally,” he said.
When asked what keeps them up at night, Widman said the unanswered question is “how to get agents into all the existing capital markets and infrastructure pipelines that power today’s payments and transactions.” Zabane said trust keeps her moving forward professionally, but personally, she “can’t wait for agents to help make my life easier.”