The Economic Order of Machines: The Full-Stack Path of Agent Commerce

Author: 0xjacobzhao

This independent research report is supported by IOSG Ventures. The research writing process was inspired by related reports from Raghav Agarwal@LongHash and Jay Yu@Pantera. Special thanks to Lex Sokolin @ Generative Ventures, Jordan@AIsa, and Ivy@The Blog of "No Words Unsaid" for their valuable suggestions on this article. During the writing process, feedback was also solicited from project teams such as Nevermined, Skyfire, Virtuals Protocol, AIsa, Heurist, and AEON. This article strives for objective and accurate content, although some viewpoints involve subjective judgments and may inevitably contain biases; readers are kindly asked for understanding.

Agentic Commerce refers to a complete commercial system where AI agents autonomously complete the entire process of service discovery, credibility assessment, order generation, payment authorization, and final settlement. It no longer relies on human step-by-step operations or information input, but instead allows agents to automatically collaborate, place orders, make payments, and fulfill contracts in a cross-platform, cross-system environment, thus forming a self-executing commercial closed loop between machines (M2M Commerce).

In the crypto space, the most practically valuable scenarios are currently concentrated in stablecoin payments and DeFi. Therefore, in the process of integrating Crypto and AI, the two most valuable paths are: AgentFi, which relies on existing mature DeFi protocols in the short term, and Agent Payment, which gradually improves around stablecoin settlements and relies on protocols such as ACP/AP2/x402/ERC-8004 in the medium to long term.

Agentic Commerce is currently limited in scale due to factors such as protocol maturity, regulatory differences, and merchant user acceptance; however, in the long run, payment serves as the foundational anchor point for all commercial closed loops, making Agentic Commerce highly valuable over time.

~1. Payment System and Application Scenarios of Agentic Commerce~

In the Agentic Commerce system, the real-world merchant network represents the greatest value scenario. Regardless of how AI Agents evolve, the traditional fiat payment systems (Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, bank transfers) and the rapidly growing stablecoin systems (USDC, x402) will coexist in the long term, together forming the foundation of Agentic Commerce.

Real-world merchants—from e-commerce, subscriptions, and SaaS to travel, content payment, and enterprise procurement—carry trillion-dollar-level demand and are also the core value source for AI Agents' automatic price comparison, renewals, and procurement. In the short term, mainstream consumer and enterprise procurement will still be dominated by traditional fiat payment systems.

The core obstacle preventing stablecoins from scaling in real-world commerce is not just technical, but also regulatory (KYC/AML, taxation, consumer protection), merchant accounting (illegal repayment of stablecoins), and the lack of dispute resolution mechanisms due to irreversible payments. Due to these structural limitations, stablecoins will find it difficult to enter highly regulated industries such as healthcare, aviation, e-commerce, government, and utilities in the short term, with their implementation primarily focusing on digital content, cross-border payments, Web3 native services, and machine economy (M2M/IoT/Agent) scenarios that have lower regulatory pressure or are natively on-chain—this is also the first opportunity window for Web3 native Agentic Commerce to achieve scale breakthroughs.

However, by 2025, regulatory institutionalization is rapidly advancing: the U.S. stablecoin bill has gained bipartisan consensus, Hong Kong and Singapore have established stablecoin licensing frameworks, the EU's MiCA has officially come into effect, Stripe supports USDC, and PayPal has launched PYUSD. The clarification of regulatory structures means that stablecoins are being accepted by the mainstream financial system, opening up policy space for future cross-border settlements, B2B procurement, and the machine economy.

Best Application Scenario Matching for Agentic Commerce

The core of Agentic Commerce is not to replace one payment track with another, but to hand over the execution subjects of "ordering---authorization---payment" to AI Agents, allowing the traditional fiat payment system (AP2, authorization credentials, identity compliance) and the stablecoin system (x402, CCTP, smart contract settlement) to leverage their respective advantages. It is neither a zero-sum competition between fiat and stablecoins nor a narrative of a single track replacement, but rather a structural opportunity that expands the capabilities of both sides simultaneously: fiat payments continue to support human commerce, while stablecoin payments accelerate machine-native and on-chain-native scenarios, with both complementing and coexisting as the dual engines of the agent economy.

~2. Overview of the Underlying Protocol Standards for Agentic Commerce~

The protocol stack of Agentic Commerce consists of six layers, forming a complete machine commerce link from "capability discovery" to "payment delivery." A2A Catalog and MCP Registry are responsible for capability discovery, ERC-8004 provides on-chain verifiable identity and reputation; ACP and AP2 undertake structured ordering and authorization instructions, respectively; the payment layer consists of traditional fiat tracks (AP2) and stablecoin tracks (x402) operating in parallel; the delivery layer currently lacks a unified standard.

• Discovery Layer: Addresses "How do Agents discover and understand callable services?" The AI side builds a standardized capability catalog through A2A Catalog and MCP Registry; Web3 relies on ERC-8004 to provide addressable identity guidance. This layer serves as the entry point for the entire protocol stack.
• Trust Layer: Answers "Is the other party trustworthy?" There is currently no universal standard on the AI side, while Web3 constructs a unified framework for verifiable identity, reputation, and execution records through ERC-8004, which is a key advantage of Web3.
• Ordering Layer: Responsible for "How are orders expressed and verified?" ACP (OpenAI × Stripe) provides a structured description of goods, prices, and settlement terms, ensuring that merchants can fulfill contracts. Due to the difficulty of expressing real-world commercial contracts on-chain, this layer is primarily dominated by Web2.
• Authorization Layer: Handles "Does the Agent have legitimate authorization from the user?" AP2 binds intent, confirmation, and payment authorization to the real identity system through verifiable credentials. Web3 signatures currently lack legal effect and therefore cannot bear the contractual and compliance responsibilities of this layer.
• Payment Layer: Determines "Through which track is the payment completed?" AP2 covers traditional payment networks such as cards and banks; x402 provides a native API payment interface for stablecoins, allowing assets like USDC to be embedded in automated calls. These two tracks form functional complementarity here.
• Fulfillment Layer: Answers "How is content securely delivered after payment is completed?" Currently, there is no unified protocol: the real world relies on merchant systems to complete delivery, while Web3's cryptographic access control has yet to form cross-ecosystem standards. This layer remains the largest blank in the protocol stack and is most likely to give birth to the next generation of foundational protocols.

~3. Detailed Explanation of Key Core Protocols for Agentic Commerce~

Focusing on the five key links of service discovery, trust assessment, structured ordering, payment authorization, and final settlement in Agentic Commerce, institutions such as Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Stripe, Ethereum, and Coinbase have proposed underlying protocols for their respective links, collectively constructing the next generation core protocol stack for Agentic Commerce.

Agent‑to‑Agent (A2A) -- Interoperability Protocol for Agents (Google)

A2A is an open-source protocol initiated by Google and donated to the Linux Foundation, aimed at providing a unified communication and collaboration standard for AI Agents built by different vendors and frameworks. A2A is based on HTTP + JSON-RPC, enabling secure, structured message and task exchanges, allowing Agents to engage in multi-turn dialogues, collaborative decision-making, task decomposition, and state management in a native manner. Its core goal is to build "the internet between agents," allowing any A2A-compatible Agent to be automatically discovered, invoked, and combined, thus forming a distributed Agent network across platforms and organizations.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) -- Unified Tool Data Access Protocol (Anthropic)

MCP, introduced by Anthropic, is an open protocol connecting LLMs/Agents with external systems, focusing on unified tool and data access interfaces. It abstracts databases, file systems, remote APIs, and proprietary tools into standardized resources, allowing Agents to access external capabilities in a secure, controllable, and auditable manner. The design of MCP emphasizes low integration costs and high scalability: developers only need to integrate once to enable Agents to use the entire tool ecosystem. MCP has been adopted by several leading AI vendors, becoming the de facto standard for agent-tool interaction.

MCP focuses on "How do Agents use tools?"—providing models with unified and secure external resource access capabilities (such as databases, APIs, file systems, etc.), thereby standardizing agent-tool/agent-data interaction methods.

A2A addresses "How do Agents collaborate with other Agents?"—establishing native communication standards for cross-vendor and cross-framework agents, supporting multi-turn dialogues, task decomposition, state management, and long-lifecycle execution, serving as the foundational interoperability layer between agents.

Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) -- Ordering and Checkout Protocol (OpenAI × Stripe)

ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) is an open ordering standard (Apache 2.0) proposed by OpenAI and Stripe, establishing a structured ordering process that can be directly understood by machines for buyers—AI Agents—merchants. The protocol covers product information, price and terms verification, settlement logic, and payment credential transmission, allowing AI to safely initiate purchases on behalf of users without becoming a merchant.

Its core design is: AI calls the merchant's checkout interface in a standardized manner, while the merchant retains all commercial and legal control. ACP supports structured orders (JSON Schema/OpenAPI), secure payment tokens (Stripe Shared Payment Token), is compatible with existing e-commerce backends, and supports REST and MCP publishing capabilities, enabling merchants to enter the AI shopping ecosystem without system overhaul. ACP has been used in ChatGPT Instant Checkout, becoming an early deployable payment infrastructure.

Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) -- Digital Authorization and Payment Instruction Protocol (Google)

AP2 is an open standard jointly launched by Google and several payment networks and technology companies, aimed at establishing a unified, compliant, and auditable process for AI Agent-led payments. It binds users' payment intentions, authorization scopes, and compliant identities through digitally signed authorization credentials, providing verifiable evidence of "who is spending money for whom" to merchants, payment institutions, and regulators.

AP2 is designed with a "Payment-Agnostic" principle, supporting credit cards, bank transfers, real-time payments, and extending access to stablecoin and other crypto payment tracks through x402. In the entire Agentic Commerce protocol stack, AP2 does not handle specific product and ordering details but provides a universal Agent payment authorization framework for various payment channels.

ERC-8004 -- On-chain Agent Identity / Reputation / Verification Standard (Ethereum)

ERC-8004 is an Ethereum standard proposed by MetaMask, the Ethereum Foundation, Google, and Coinbase, aimed at building a cross-platform, verifiable, and trustless identity and reputation system for AI Agents. The protocol consists of three on-chain components:

• Identity Registry: Mints on-chain identities similar to NFTs for each Agent, which can link to MCP/A2A endpoints, ENS/DID, wallets, and other cross-platform information.
• Reputation Registry: Standardizes the recording of scores, feedback, and behavioral signals, making the historical performance of Agents auditable, aggregable, and combinable.
• Validation Registry: Supports stake re-execution, zkML, TEE, and other verification mechanisms, providing verifiable execution records for high-value tasks.

Through ERC-8004, the identity, reputation, and behavior of Agents are recorded on-chain, forming a discoverable, tamper-proof, and verifiable trust foundation across platforms, which is an important infrastructure for building an open and trustworthy AI economy in Web3. ERC-8004 is currently in the review stage, indicating that the standard is basically stable and feasible, but is still widely soliciting community opinions and has not yet been finalized.

x402 -- Native API Payment Track for Stablecoins (Coinbase)

x402 is an open payment standard (Apache-2.0) proposed by Coinbase, transforming the long-idle HTTP 402 Payment Required into a programmable on-chain payment handshake mechanism, allowing APIs and AI Agents to achieve accountless, frictionless, on-demand payment settlements without needing accounts, credit cards, or API keys.

Illustration: HTTP 402 Payment Workflow. Source: Jay Yu@Pantera Capital

Core Mechanism: The x402 protocol revives the HTTP 402 status code left over from the early internet. Its workflow is:

• Request and Negotiation: The client (Agent) initiates a request -> The server returns a 402 status code and payment parameters (such as amount, receiving address).
• Self-Payment: The Agent locally signs the transaction and broadcasts it (usually using stablecoins like USDC), without human intervention.
• Verification and Delivery: The server or a third-party "Facilitator" verifies the on-chain transaction and releases resources immediately.

x402 introduces the role of Facilitator, acting as middleware connecting Web2 APIs and Web3 settlement layers. The Facilitator is responsible for handling complex on-chain verification and settlement logic, allowing traditional developers to monetize APIs with minimal code, while the server does not need to run nodes, manage signatures, or broadcast transactions, relying solely on the interfaces provided by the Facilitator to complete on-chain payment processing. The most mature Facilitator implementation is provided by the Coinbase Developer Platform.

Technical Advantages of x402 include: supporting on-chain micropayments as low as $0.01, breaking through the limitations of traditional payment gateways that cannot handle high-frequency small calls in AI scenarios; completely removing accounts, KYC, and API keys, allowing AI to autonomously complete M2M payment closed loops; and achieving gasless USDC authorized payments through EIP-3009, natively compatible with Base and Solana, with multi-chain scalability.

Based on the introduction to the core protocol stack of Agentic Commerce, the following table summarizes the positioning, core capabilities, major limitations, and maturity assessments of the protocols at each level, providing a clear structured perspective for building a cross-platform, executable, and payable agent economy.

~4. Representative Projects in the Web3 Agentic Commerce Ecosystem~

The current Web3 ecosystem of Agentic Commerce can be divided into three layers:

• Business Payment System Layer (L3), including projects like Skyfire, Payman, Catena Labs, and Nevermined, providing payment encapsulation, SDK integration, quota and permission governance, human approval, and compliance access, and connecting to traditional financial tracks (banks, card organizations, PSPs, KYC/KYB) to build a bridge between payment business and machine economy.
• Native Payment Protocol Layer (L2), composed of protocols like x402 and Virtual ACP and their ecosystem projects, responsible for charging requests, payment verification, and on-chain settlements, forming the core that truly achieves automation and end-to-end clearing in the current agent economy. x402 operates independently of banks, card organizations, and payment service providers, providing on-chain native M2M/A2A payment capabilities.
• Infrastructure Layer (L1), including Ethereum, Base, Solana, and Kite AI, providing a trusted foundation for on-chain execution environments, key systems, MPC/AA, and permission Runtime for payment and identity systems.

L3 Business Payment System Layer - Skyfire: Identity and Payment Credentials for AI Agents

Skyfire centers on KYA + Pay, abstracting "identity verification + payment authorization" into JWT credentials usable by AI, providing verifiable automated access and charging capabilities for websites, APIs, and MCP services. The system automatically generates Buyer/Seller Agents and custodial wallets for users, supporting card, bank, and USDC top-ups.

At the system level, Skyfire generates Buyer/Seller Agents and custodial wallets for each user, supporting balance top-ups via cards, banks, and USDC. Its greatest advantage is full compatibility with Web2 (JWT/JWKS, WAF, API Gateway can be used directly), providing "identity + automated payment access" for content websites, data APIs, and tool-based SaaS.

Skyfire is a practical intermediary layer for Agent Payments, but both identity and asset custody are centralized solutions.

~L3 Business Payment System Layer - Payman: AI Native Fund Permission Risk Control~

Payman provides four capabilities: Wallet, Payee, Policy, and Approval, building a "fund permission layer" that can be governed and audited for AI. AI can execute real payments, but all fund actions must meet user-defined quotas, policies, and approval rules. Core interactions are completed through the natural language interface payman.ask(), with the system responsible for intent parsing, policy verification, and payment execution.

The key value of Payman lies in: "AI can move money, but never overstep its authority." It shifts enterprise-level fund governance to the AI environment: automatic payroll, reimbursements, vendor payments, bulk transfers, etc., can all be completed within clearly defined permission boundaries. Payman is suitable for financial automation within enterprises and teams (salaries, reimbursements, vendor payments, etc.), positioning itself as a controlled fund governance layer, without attempting to build an open Agent-to-Agent payment protocol.

L3 Business Payment System Layer - Catena Labs: Agent Identity / Payment Standards

Catena builds a unified identity protocol (ACK-ID) and Agent-native payment protocol (ACK-Pay) for Agents, focusing on AI-native financial institutions (custody, clearing, risk control, KYA) as the commercial layer and ACK (Agent Commerce Kit) as the standard layer. The goal is to fill the gaps in the machine economy regarding verifiable identity, authorization chains, and automated payment standards.

ACK-ID establishes the ownership and authorization chains of Agents based on DID/VC; ACK-Pay defines payment requests and verifiable receipt formats decoupled from underlying settlement networks (USDC, banks, Arc). Catena emphasizes long-term cross-ecosystem interoperability, positioning itself closer to the "TLS/EMV layer of the Agent economy," with strong standardization and a clear vision.

L3 Business Payment System Layer - Nevermined: Metering, Billing, and Micropayment Settlement

Nevermined focuses on usage-based AI economic models, providing Access Control, Metering, Credits System, and Usage Logs for automated metering, pay-per-use billing, revenue sharing, and auditing. Users can top up credits via Stripe or USDC, and the system automatically verifies usage, charges, and generates auditable logs with each API call.

Its core value lies in supporting sub-cent real-time micropayments and Agent-to-Agent automated settlements, allowing data purchases, API calls, and workflow scheduling to operate on a "pay-per-call" basis. Nevermined does not build new payment tracks but constructs a metering/billing layer on top of payments: driving AI SaaS commercialization in the short term, supporting A2A marketplaces in the medium term, and potentially becoming the micropayment fabric of the machine economy in the long term.

Skyfire, Payman, Catena Labs, and Nevermined belong to the business payment layer, all needing to connect to banks, card organizations, PSPs, and KYC/KYB to varying degrees, but their true value lies not in "accessing fiat," but in addressing machine-native needs that traditional finance cannot cover—identity mapping, permission governance, programmatic risk control, and per-call billing.

• Skyfire (Payment Gateway): Provides "identity + automatic charging" for websites/APIs (on-chain identity mapping to Web2 identity)
• Payman (Financial Governance): Focuses on internal enterprise policies, quotas, permissions, and approvals (AI can spend money but not overstep authority)
• Catena Labs (Financial Infrastructure): Combines with the banking system to build (AI-compliant banking) through KYA, custody, and clearing services
• Nevermined (Cash Register): Only focuses on metering and billing on top of payments; payments rely on Stripe/USDC.

In contrast, x402 operates at a lower level, being the only native on-chain payment protocol that does not rely on banks, card organizations, or PSPs, capable of completing on-chain deductions and settlements directly through the 402 workflow. When upper-layer systems like Skyfire, Payman, and Nevermined can all call x402 as a settlement track, it provides Agents with a truly native M2M/A2A automated payment closed loop.

L2 Native Payment Protocol Layer - x402 Ecosystem: From Client to On-chain Settlement

The x402 native payment ecosystem can be divided into four levels: Client, Server, Payment Execution Layer (Facilitators), and Blockchain Settlement Layer. Client is responsible for initiating payment requests from Agents or applications; Server sells data, inference, or storage API services to Agents on a per-call basis; Payment Execution Layer completes on-chain deductions, verifications, and settlements, serving as the core execution engine of the entire process; Blockchain Settlement Layer is responsible for the final token deductions and on-chain confirmations, achieving tamper-proof payment implementation.

Illustration: X402 Payment Flow Source: x402 White Paper

Client Integration Layer (Client-Side Integrations / The Payers): Enables Agents or applications to initiate x402 payment requests, serving as the "starting point" of the entire payment process. Representative projects include:

• thirdweb Client SDK ------ The most commonly used x402 client standard in the ecosystem, actively maintained, supporting multiple chains, and serving as the default tool for developers integrating x402.
• Nuwa AI ------ Allows AI to directly pay for x402 services without coding, representing the "Agent payment entry."

The official website also lists early clients such as Axios/Fetch, Mogami Java SDK, and Tweazy.

Currently, existing clients remain in the "SDK era," essentially serving as developer tools. More advanced forms of clients, such as browser/OS clients, robot/IoT clients, or enterprise systems capable of managing multiple wallets/multiple Facilitators, have yet to emerge.

Server / API Product Side (Services / Endpoints / The Sellers): Sells data, storage, or inference services to Agents on a per-call basis, with representative projects including:

• AIsa ------ Provides API calling and settlement infrastructure for real operational AI Agents to access data, content, computing power, and third-party services on a per-call, per-token, or usage basis, currently leading in x402 call volume.
• Firecrawl ------ The most commonly consumed web parsing and structured crawling entry for AI Agents.
• Pinata ------ Mainstream Web3 storage infrastructure, with x402 already able to cover real underlying storage costs for non-lightweight APIs.
• Gloria AI ------ Provides high-frequency real-time news and structured market signals, serving as an intelligence source for trading and analytical Agents.
• AEON ------ Extends x402 + USDC to offline and online merchant acquisition in Southeast Asia / Latin America / Africa, reaching 50M merchants.
• Neynar ------ The social graph infrastructure of Farcaster, opening social data to Agents via x402.

Current servers focus on crawling/storage/news APIs, while more advanced key layers that can execute financial transaction APIs, advertising APIs, Web2 SaaS gateways, or even APIs that can execute real-world tasks are almost undeveloped, representing the most potential growth curve for the future.

Payment Execution Layer (Facilitators / The Processors): Completes on-chain deductions, verifications, and settlements, serving as the core execution engine of x402, with representative projects including:

• Coinbase Facilitator (CDP) ------ An enterprise-level trusted executor, promoting zero fees on the Base mainnet + built-in OFAC/KYT, making it the strongest choice for production environments.
• PayAI Facilitator ------ The most widely covered and fastest-growing execution layer project across multiple chains (Solana, Polygon, Base, Avalanche, etc.), being the most used multi-chain Facilitator in the ecosystem.
• Daydreams ------ A strong scenario project combining payment execution with LLM inference routing, currently the fastest-growing "AI inference payment executor," becoming the third force in the x402 ecosystem.

According to x402scan data from the past 30 days, there are also a number of mid to long-tail Facilitators/Routers, including Dexter, Virtuals Protocol, OpenX402, CodeNut, Heurist, Thirdweb, x402.rs, Mogami, Questflow, etc., with overall transaction volume, seller count, and buyer count significantly lower than the top three.

Blockchain Settlement Layer: The final landing point of the x402 payment workflow, responsible for completing the actual token deductions and on-chain confirmations. Although the x402 protocol itself is chain-agnostic, current ecosystem data shows that settlements are primarily concentrated on two networks:

• Base ------ Promoted by the official CDP Facilitator, natively supports USDC, with stable fees, currently the largest settlement network in terms of transaction volume and seller count.
• Solana ------ Supported by multi-chain Facilitators like PayAI, growing the fastest in high-frequency inference and real-time API scenarios due to high throughput and low latency.

The chain itself does not participate in payment logic; as more Facilitators expand, the x402 settlement layer will show a stronger trend towards multi-chain.

In the x402 payment system, Facilitators are the only true executors of on-chain payments, closest to "protocol-level revenue": responsible for verifying payment authorizations, submitting and tracking on-chain transactions, and generating auditable settlement proofs, while also handling replay, timeout, multi-chain compatibility, and basic compliance checks. Unlike Client SDKs (Payers) and API servers (Sellers) that only handle HTTP requests, they control traffic entry and settlement fees, thus being at the core of value capture in the agent economy, attracting significant market attention.

However, the reality is that most projects remain in testing or small-scale demo stages, essentially just lightweight "payment executors," lacking moats in key capabilities such as identity, billing, risk control, and multi-chain steady-state processing, presenting obvious low barriers to entry and high homogeneity. As the ecosystem matures, Facilitators backed by stability and compliance advantages, such as Coinbase, indeed have a noticeable first-mover advantage, but as CDP Facilitators begin to charge fees while other Facilitators may explore different monetization models, the overall market landscape and share distribution still have significant room for evolution. In the long run, x402 remains an interface layer that cannot carry core value; the truly sustainable competitive advantage lies in comprehensive platforms that can build identity, billing, risk control, and compliance systems on top of settlement capabilities.

~L2 Native Payment Protocol Layer - Virtual Agent Commerce Protocol~

Virtual's Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP) provides a universal commercial interaction standard for autonomous AI, enabling independent agents to request services, negotiate terms, complete transactions, and receive quality evaluations in a secure and verifiable manner through a four-phase process: Request → Negotiation → Transaction → Evaluation. ACP uses blockchain as a trusted execution layer, ensuring that the interaction process is auditable and tamper-proof, and establishes an incentive-driven reputation system by introducing Evaluator Agents, allowing heterogeneous and independent professional Agents to form "autonomous commercial entities" without centralized coordination, engaging in sustainable economic activities. Currently, ACP has surpassed the early experimental stage and is beginning to scale its ecosystem, not limited to exploring "multi-agent commercial interaction standards."

L1 Infrastructure Layer - Emerging / Vertical Agent Native Payment Chains

Mainstream general-purpose public chains like Ethereum, Base (EVM), and Solana provide Agents with the most essential execution environments, account systems, state machines, security, and settlement foundations, possessing mature account models, stablecoin ecosystems, and a broad developer base.

Kite AI is a representative "Agent native L1" infrastructure, designed specifically for Agents to provide the underlying execution environment for payments, identity, and permissions. Its core is based on the SPACE framework (stablecoin native, programmable constraints, agent-first authentication, compliance auditing, economically viable micropayments), and implements a three-layer key system (Root→Agent→Session) for fine-grained risk isolation; combined with optimized state channels, it builds an "Agent native payment railway," reducing costs to $0.000001 and controlling delays to the millisecond level, making API-level high-frequency micropayments feasible. As a general execution layer, Kite is upward compatible with x402, Google A2A, and Anthropic MCP, and downward compatible with OAuth 2.1, aiming to become the unified Agent payment and identity foundation connecting Web2 and Web3.

AIsaNet integrates x402 and L402 (the 402 payment protocol standard developed based on the Lightning Network by Lightning Labs) as a micropayment and settlement layer for AI Agents, supporting high-frequency trading, cross-protocol call coordination, settlement path selection, and transaction routing, allowing Agents to complete cross-service and cross-chain automated payments without understanding the underlying complexities.

~5. Conclusion and Outlook: From Payment Protocols to the Reconstruction of Machine Economic Order~

Agentic Commerce represents the establishment of a new economic order led by machines. It is not as simple as "AI automatically placing orders," but rather a complete reconstruction of a cross-entity link: how services are discovered, how credibility is established, how orders are expressed, how permissions are authorized, how value is settled, and who bears disputes. The emergence of A2A, MCP, ACP, AP2, ERC-8004, and x402 standardizes the "commercial closed loop between machines."

Along this evolutionary path, future payment infrastructures will diverge into two parallel tracks: one based on traditional fiat logic for business governance, and the other based on the x402 protocol for native settlement. The value capture logic between these two is different.

1. Business Governance Track: Web3 Business Payment System Layer

• Applicable Scenarios: Real-world transactions with low frequency and non-micropayments (e.g., procurement, SaaS subscriptions, physical e-commerce).
• Core Logic: Traditional fiat will dominate in the long term, with Agents serving as smarter front ends and process coordinators, rather than replacing Stripe/card organizations/bank transfers. The hard barriers for stablecoins to enter the real commercial world are regulatory and tax-related.
• The value of projects like Skyfire, Payman, and Catena Labs lies not in the underlying payment routing (usually handled by Stripe/Circle), but in machine governance services (Governance-as-a-Service). That is, addressing machine-native needs that traditional finance cannot cover—identity mapping, permission governance, programmatic risk control, liability attribution, and M2M/A2A micropayments (settling by token/second). The key is who can become the trusted "AI financial steward" for enterprises.

2. Native Settlement Track: The Endgame of the x402 Protocol Ecosystem and Facilitators

• Applicable Scenarios: High-frequency, micropayments, M2M/A2A digital native transactions (API billing, resource flow payments).
• Core Logic: x402, as an open standard, achieves atomic binding of payments and resources through the HTTP 402 status code. In programmable micropayments and M2M/A2A scenarios, x402 is currently the most complete and advanced protocol in the ecosystem (HTTP native + on-chain settlement), with its position in the agent economy expected to be akin to 'Stripe for agents.'
• Simply integrating x402 at the Client or Service end does not bring track premiums; the real growth potential lies in accumulating long-term repeat purchases and high-frequency calls in upper-layer assets, such as OS-level Agent clients, robot/IoT wallets, and high-value API services (market data, GPU inference, real-world task execution, etc.).
• Facilitators assist Clients and Servers in completing payment handshakes, invoice generation, and fund settlements, acting as protocol gateways that control both traffic and settlement fees, making them the closest link to "revenue" in the current x402 Stack. Most Facilitators are essentially just "payment executors," exhibiting obvious low barriers to entry and homogeneity. Giants with usability and compliance advantages (like Coinbase) form a dominant pattern. The core value to avoid marginalization will shift to the "Facilitator + X" service layer: building verifiable service directories and reputation systems, providing arbitration, risk control, treasury management, and other high-margin capabilities.

We believe that the future will form a "fiat system" and a "stablecoin system" running in parallel: the former supports mainstream human commerce, while the latter carries high-frequency, cross-border, micropayment scenarios that are machine-native and on-chain-native. The role of Web3 is not to replace traditional payments but to provide the foundational capabilities of verifiable identity, programmable settlement, and global stablecoins for the Agent era. Ultimately, Agentic Commerce is not limited to payment optimization but is a reconstruction of the machine economic order. When billions of micropayments are automatically completed by Agents in the background, those protocols and companies that first provide trust, coordination, and optimization capabilities will become the core forces of the next generation of global commercial infrastructure.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by AI tools such as ChatGPT-5 and Gemini 3 during the writing process. The author has made efforts to proofread and ensure the information is true and accurate, but there may still be omissions; your understanding is appreciated. It should be particularly noted that the crypto asset market generally exhibits a divergence between project fundamentals and secondary market price performance. The content of this article is for information integration and academic/research exchange only and does not constitute any investment advice, nor should it be viewed as a recommendation for buying or selling any tokens.