Mastercard is diving deeper into AI payments. The card giant announced on Wednesday that it was launching a protocol to let AI actors more easily pay each other. Called Agent Pay for Machines, the new network is meant to make smaller money transfers easier when, for example, an AI agent wants to access data piecemeal from a website.
To ensure that bots act as instructed, Mastercard’s new protocol stores permissions that humans grant their AI agents onto a blockchain. As opposed to a private database, this information is accessible to multiple parties that want to verify whether an agent is acting as instructed. Initially, Mastercard chose to log those permissions onto Polygon, a network of blockchains built on top of Ethereum, the card company’s spokesperson told Fortune.
Other companies that are working with the payments giant to develop its AI payments protocol include the fintech Adyen, the crypto exchange Coinbase, and the web-hosting giant Cloudflare.
“Am I expecting that this is going to be a huge revenue driver for Mastercard next year? No,” said Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s chief product officer. “Do I think it’ll be a meaningful new addressable market for us over the next five years? I think so.”
