MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – Top officials from Google Cloud and PayPal said at CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference on Thursday that the next wave of internet commerce will run on crypto rails because AI agents structurally cannot use traditional financial accounts.
Richard Widmann, global head of Web3 strategy at Google Cloud, said the existing Internet user experience does not extend to autonomous agents.
“An agent can’t get a bank account. It’s not difficult, it’s just impossible,” he said, citing technological and regulatory barriers. Crypto, on the other hand, is “a fantastic machine-readable interface for payments,” Widmann said.
To address this gap, Google has launched Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2), an open protocol that has been donated to the FIDO Foundation and has more than 120 partners, including PayPal, Widmann said. He compared the change to the x402 Internet-native payment standard awarded to the Linux Foundation.
“Open dialogues and open standards are really the foundation to build on,” Widmann said.
May Zabaneh, senior vice president and general manager of crypto at PayPal, said the company is treating agents as the next channel after PayPal’s evolution from offline commerce to online and mobile commerce. PYUSD, the company’s stablecoin, is “a very natural programmable layer for payments,” he said, particularly as commerce trends toward globalization, native AI experiences and tokenized assets.
Zabaneh cited a recent PayPal survey that found that 95% of merchants now see traffic from AI agents on their sites, but only 20% have machine-readable catalogs. “Merchants must be prepared for the next era,” he said. The change, he added, reflects the shift from offline to online stores; Merchants need to display their products in formats readable by agents.
As for liability, Zabaneh said the question of who is responsible if an agent makes a bad purchase is “definitely something we have to consider as an industry.” Widmann said multi-party custody is becoming critical to agent design. Google has expanded its Cloud KMS platform to cryptocurrency custody, and Widmann argued that an agent should have only one of two or three key fragments rather than the entire private key. “You can’t just move funds or take action unilaterally,” he said.
When asked what keeps them up at night, Widmann said the open question is “how do you incorporate agents into all the existing capital markets and the infrastructure that powers payments and commerce today?” Zabaneh said the confidence keeps her going professionally, though personally she “can’t wait for an agency to help make my life easier.”
