Late-night explosion! The war over AI Agent payment standards has fully erupted, with Google, OpenAI, Visa, and Coinbase fighting fiercely for the next trillion-dollar gateway. Have you ambushed your $WAL?

Take my advice, don’t just focus on the candlestick charts. What truly determines your wealth level five years from now is the high-stakes gamble of tech giants—AI Agent payment standards.

Simply put, in the future, your wallet might not be swiped by yourself, but instead, an AI Agent will go shopping for you, adjust APIs, buy computing resources. Behind this are two battlegrounds: one is Agent shopping on your behalf (human makes the decision, Agent executes), and the other is Agents paying each other (completely autonomous).

Now, Google, OpenAI, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, Circle, Ethereum, Kite AI are all stepping into the ring, each pushing their own standards. Whoever wins will be able to carve up every piece of transaction traffic.

First, let’s talk about Google. It’s using UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) to unify merchant interfaces, and AP2 (Agent Payment Protocol) to lock in authorization credentials. The idea is similar to open-sourcing Android back in the day, letting merchants and Agents run on Google’s infrastructure. Google’s ad revenue hits $262.7 billion, cloud services $58 billion, but replacing search ads with Agents is only a matter of time. Google is taking a dual approach—UCP manages discovery, AP2 handles payments. If merchants don’t join, they lose Agent traffic; if they do, Google Pay and cloud services naturally follow.

OpenAI and Stripe jointly launched the ACP protocol. Its core is Delegate Payment, which prevents Agents from directly accessing user card info, instead issuing a one-time token (SPT) via Stripe, with limits on merchant, amount, and duration. OpenAI’s subscription revenue ceiling is now visible; after a failed Instant Checkout trial, they acquired financial app Hiro Finance, preparing to upgrade inventory, tax, and fraud detection capabilities. The goal: make ChatGPT the starting point for all Agent shopping, taking a 4% commission on each transaction.

Visa and Mastercard’s strategy is more cunning—they’re not participating in protocol wars but ensuring all protocols must go through their card networks. Visa launched Intelligent Commerce, with five APIs, still charging card network fees; Mastercard uses Cloudflare to automatically identify trusted Agent traffic at merchant frontends, requiring no code changes. As long as transactions go through their card networks, Visa and Mastercard keep earning.

Stripe is the only player betting on both battlegrounds simultaneously. On the Agent shopping layer, it co-promotes ACP+SPT with OpenAI; on the Agent-to-Agent payment layer, it launched the MPP protocol and Tempo chain. MPP supports cards, stablecoins, Lightning Network, aiming for over 1 million transactions per second. Tempo is a payment-specific chain built jointly by Stripe and Paradigm, with Stripe acting as a validator. Open protocols, closed-source infrastructure—every transaction passing through Stripe incurs a fee.

Coinbase bets on a pure crypto route—the x402 protocol, based on HTTP 402 status code. When an Agent calls an API, the server returns a payment request; the Agent signs with its wallet, and settlement occurs on-chain. x402 only supports stablecoins, with the default settlement layer being Base chain. Coinbase offers the protocol for free, but transaction fees flow into Base validators (Coinbase itself). By 2026, x402 has accumulated over 100 million payments.

Circle, as the issuer of USDC, plays the asset layer game. It launched Nanopayments (off-chain aggregation + batch settlement), Arc chain (native USDC as gas), and Developer-Controlled Wallets. Whichever chain wins, as long as Agents settle with USDC, Circle’s reserves grow (2025 revenue: $2.7 billion, 95% from reserve interest). After Arc’s mainnet launch, each transaction’s gas fee also becomes USDC demand, generating interest compounding.

Ethereum Foundation targets the trust layer—with the ERC-8004 standard, defining Agent identity, reputation, and verification results. This standard records on-chain who the Agent is, their historical performance, and task verification proofs. Co-authors include MetaMask, Google, Coinbase. Payments themselves aren’t directly involved, but since trust is needed for payments, ERC-8004 makes trust portable.

Finally, Kite AI, a full-stack L1 chain designed from scratch for Agents. It supports protocols like x402, MPP, AP2, with a core three-layer identity architecture (user root authority + Agent delegation + session signatures). It has investment ties with Coinbase Ventures and PayPal. Still in testnet, it carries the highest uncertainty.

Let’s clarify the timeline: the Agent shopping market will explode first because its structure is compatible with existing card systems. For example, if you ask an Agent to book a flight, it uses Google’s UCP to find products, then pays with a Visa card—each step incremental. The Agent-to-Agent payment market (Pay-per-call) will only truly open once Agent trust and autonomy are strong enough, and subscription models can’t satisfy micro-payments.

What you should focus on now isn’t guessing who will win, but understanding a clear main thread: regardless of which protocol prevails, the underlying payment infrastructure depends on stablecoins and on-chain settlement. That’s why $USDC, $ETH, $BTC, and infrastructure tokens in the DePIN track will continue to benefit.

For example, Sui’s storage layer Walrus ($WAL) is a core component providing decentralized data storage for AI Agents. Agents generate massive logs, model weights, transaction proofs during interactions; traditional centralized storage is costly and untrustworthy. Walrus leverages DePIN logic, allowing users to sell idle storage resources to AI networks, forming storage-as-a-service. It complements the payment layer—Agents pay for storage, and stored data supports payment credibility.

So, don’t just watch price swings. The outcome of this standards war will reshape the entire crypto industry’s revenue distribution over the next three years. What you need to do now is understand each player’s “hand,” then find that asset which, no matter who wins, can be taxed.

#Walrus $WAL #Sui #DePIN @Walrus

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