As AI agents increasingly transact, buy, and act autonomously online—a market that may reach $3 trillion to $5 trillion by 2030—a key question arises: how to verify that a real person is behind the activity.
The Sam Altman-backed World Identity Project (formerly WorldCoin) says it has the solution.
On Tuesday, the company launched AgentKit, a developer toolset that allows AI agents to carry cryptographic proof that they are backed by a unique human, using its World ID system. The product runs on x402, a protocol developed by Coinbase and Cloudflare that enables “agent payments” by embedding stablecoin micropayments into the internet communication layer so that AI agents and software can pay each other without human intervention.
“Payments are the ‘how’ of agent commerce, but identity is the ‘who,’” said Erik Reppel, head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform and founder of x402. “This is a big step toward a website where agents are not just seen as automated traffic, but as legitimate economic participants.”
The move comes at a time when AI agents are evolving rapidly, handling time-consuming and often frustrating tasks, from making reservations to browsing e-commerce marketplaces in search of the best deals. Some estimates suggest that agent commerce could reach $3 trillion to $5 trillion by 2030, and that agents will account for up to 25% of U.S. e-commerce, World said.
Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong said he believes “very soon” there will be more AI agents than humans making transactions. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao went further, predicting that agents will make a million times more payments than people, “and they will use cryptocurrency.”
the missing piece
However, as the agent commerce market expands, its widespread use creates a problem that payments alone cannot solve: identity.
“One person could manage thousands of agents and all pay small fees,” said DC Builder, a research engineer at the World Foundation. “The Human Test addresses this gap.”
World’s spokesperson explained that AgentKit addresses this by linking multiple agents to a single verified human, allowing platforms to impose limits at the identity level.
“AgentKit allows developers to link multiple agents to the same verified human,” the spokesperson said. “This means that a platform can allow someone to manage multiple agents while still enforcing limits based on the underlying person.”
That could allow services to limit usage, such as a free trial or a set number of bookings per day per person, regardless of how many agents are deployed, the spokesperson added.
Another problem with agent trading is that most websites treat automated traffic as suspicious and even block bots outright. That approach, designed to stop abuse, is increasingly at odds with a world in which legitimate software agents are gradually acting on the user’s behalf.
AgentKit allows users to delegate their World ID, privacy-preserving proof that they are a unique human being, to AI agents acting on their behalf. And World is positioning this not as a replacement for other identity systems, but as a foundational layer.
“This is not necessarily an election,” a World spokesperson told CoinDesk. “World ID is designed to be a human-layer test that developers can use on their own or in conjunction with other identity systems.”
The system uses zero-knowledge proofs so platforms can verify that an agent represents a real person without collecting or storing personal data, a design that World says is necessary to scale identity on an AI-powered web.
Beyond Orb Verification
AgentKit, which is currently in beta, is based on Orb-based biometric verification, the most controversial component in the world.
But the company says it plans to expand the system to include additional credentials. That will include NFC-enabled passports and IDs through “Global Identification Credentials,” allowing users to demonstrate attributes about themselves without revealing personal information.
“Beyond the beta, we plan to expand AgentKit alongside the next generation of the World ID protocol,” the spokesperson said.
With a world real-time human verification meter reading of 17,912,203 at the time of writing, its networks are among the world’s largest personality tests. It also makes clear its broader ambition: to become the identity layer of an Internet increasingly populated not only by people, but also by artificial intelligence agents acting on their behalf.
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