Highlights

- The Inaugural Year of AI Payment Standardization: Google collaborates with the industry to release **AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol)**, incorporating *AI-driven user transactions* into a unified, auditable paradigm through Mandate + Verifiable Credential.

- Coinbase joins forces with the Ethereum community to promote x402, making *API Call as Payment* a reality — native stablecoin support, Agent-to-Agent (A2A) direct connection.

- Convergence of Two Tracks: Fiat Rail (AP2) and Crypto Rail (x402) advance together towards the same endgame: **Agent-Centric Payment Semantic Layer**.

- Startup Spotlight: The most lacking productization components and secure risk control middle platform above the protocol. **FluxA** chooses to be the first batch of road-ready mass production vehicles.

Opening Act: Big Tech Giants Racing to Lead in AI Payment, True Inflection Point Emerges

The AI arena is perhaps the most relentless battlefield right now, with the arms race on the model side still in full swing, and a brand-new battlefield — AI Payment — slowly emerging. Stripe announced the launch of its own Payment L1, Tempo, Paypal announced an investment in Kite.AI, and just yesterday, Google announced the release of its open-source payment protocol Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and will collaborate with Coinbase's previously launched X402 by integrating X402 into Google's self-developed A2A framework.

With the gradual development of AI, the industry's contemplation of the boundaries of AI capabilities and commercialization has also entered the next stage. More and more people are beginning to realize that payment capability is essential for an Agent because payment is not just a simple function. Behind this lies the fact that when Agentic AI becomes the new "first-class citizen" of the Internet, it will disrupt traditional e-commerce operations, advertising, content distribution, and the fundamental logic of Internet finance, giving rise to a new Agentic Commerce centered around AI.

This article will deeply analyze the latest advancements of the two giants in the AI Payment field: Google's AP2 and Coinbase's X402, starting from here to analyze the development trends and opportunities in the AI Payment field.

01｜AP2: Incorporating How AI Spends Money into a Regulatable Common Grammar

Google, together with over 60 payment networks, financial institutions, e-commerce, and blockchain companies, released the **AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol)** this week, attempting to establish a unified standard for the **intersection of AI and payments**.

Before AI existed, traditional payments involved a person clicking 'Buy' on the payment backend to complete a purchase. Any non-human-initiated, automated payment behavior was considered 'unsafe' by the entire payment system, which has developed a very mature risk management system to handle this risk. However, in the AI era, this has become a challenge. If we allow AI to initiate transactions on behalf of humans, how do we confirm: 1. Whether the user has truly authorized the AI to make the transaction? 2. Whether the AI's request represents the user's genuine intent? 3. How to hold the AI accountable if issues arise during the transaction?

Google's AP2 addresses this issue by defining an open protocol standard, providing a common language for secure and compliant transactions between AI and merchants. This essentially establishes a dual authorization mechanism between the user, AI, and the merchant:

- Intent Mandate: The user provides a clear intent of what they want to purchase, the budget limit, and a time window;

- Cart Mandate: The agent identifies the specific item and price, then requests the user to sign for confirmation again.

Both authorizations are encrypted with **verifiable credentials** and form an **irrefutable chain of evidence** after user signature confirmation. For merchants and clearing networks, this means they receive a payment request not from an unidentifiable robot but from a **user-authorized, verifiable 'transaction contract.' Merchants and clearing networks can confidently acknowledge the legitimacy of the transaction and proceed with clearance based on the 'transaction contract' defined by Google**.

AP2 does not aim to overhaul the settlement networks of Visa/ACH/stablecoins and blockchain but rather adds a **trust semantic layer of 'who is spending, based on what authority, and how violations can be traced back'** on top of them. It attempts to adapt and address the confirmation of AI payment intent in various stablecoin-to-fiat settlement networks. In the traditional payment scenario, each of us manually clicks the 'Buy' button to initiate a transaction. In the era of AI and stablecoins, in the 'dark forest,' we need to use cryptography and process constraints to incorporate every AI's behavior into order, ensuring that AI does not misuse its money-moving power to harm users' funds.

Although the entire design and development of AP2 are still in a very early stage, we can clearly see Google's thinking and focus on AI payments, which is to eliminate various participants along the Agent payment chain, addressing concerns about the potential trouble that an agent's reckless spending may cause. This is an indispensable part of AI completing a payment transaction:

- For Consumers: Yes, AI payment becomes a border trust for consumers. Budget, category, time window, exception rules are all solidified in the authorization; in case of issues, it can be traced back to what was authorized at that time, achieving **prevention of authorization abuse and post-event appealability**.

- For Merchants and Payment Networks: Transforming the confirmation of whether it is the actual intent of the person from verbal/interface confirmation to **verifiable intent credentials**; chargebacks and dispute resolution have chain evidence, reducing gray losses and compliance uncertainty.

- For the Ecosystem: Establishing a **common semantic aspect** for AI participation in payments, facilitating multi-party collaborative innovation (identity, risk control, clearing and settlement, factoring, etc.) to remain consistent on the same problem definition.

- For Enterprise IT/Compliance: Transitioning processes such as automatic purchasing, subscription expansion, bill payment delegation from policy documents + manual review to **protocol-level policy enforcement**; audits have shifted from end-of-month alignment to **real-time traceability**, meeting both internal control and external regulatory requirements.

02｜x402: Binding Payments with Services, Utilizing Stablecoins to Build a New Machine Economy

If Google is more concerned with the settlement layer and AI payment authorization and security issues, and Coinbase, which is inherently closer to stablecoins and blockchain, directly links AI to the transaction itself through the x402 protocol promoted by the Ethereum Foundation, Coinbase aims to shape stablecoins and blockchain into the native currency and payment primitives of AI payments, pairing AI's payment behavior with "consumption" behavior**.

x402 is derived from HTTP 402, an HTTP status code that signifies "Payment Required" to access the resource. Before the era of AI and stablecoins, this status was rarely standardized. In recent years, the rise of AI has shown developers its potential. As visits to web pages and API calls increasingly originate from AI rather than real people, should AI also pay for their access?

The approach X402 takes to solve this problem is to start from the payment link, allowing the API call and payment to be natively coupled:

When an AI agent calls a certain service, X402 will provide the AI agent with a payment "invoice" via HTTP based on the payment information predefined by the service provider. The AI agent can then use **USD Coin (USDC) or other stablecoins** to settle the payment for the service directly on-chain according to this "invoice." The service provider will immediately release the service to the AI.

Although X402 is currently just a simple protocol rather than a complete product, it combines the capabilities of AI and stablecoins to illustrate what AI-native payments could look like and their potential:

For AI agents, the existence of X402 allows AI agents to seamlessly integrate service calls and payments, leveraging a decentralized, highly programmable stablecoin network. AI agents no longer need to go through the human workflow of "linking a credit card—initiating a deduction—waiting for a channel callback" but can truly achieve pay-as-you-go. Furthermore, unlike humans with relatively low payment frequencies, the parallel processing capabilities enable AI agents to have much higher payment frequencies. X402 enables AI agents to perform fine-grained, automated micropayments and streaming payments without the need to preconfigure various accounts and API keys for different platforms. This enables AI agents to automatically negotiate prices when facing a 402 challenge.

For AI service providers, X402 brings the "access equals pricing" capability down to the protocol layer. In the future, developers in the X402 ecosystem can finely segment pages, APIs, and data into micropayments, implementing complex payment models based on requests, tokens, duration billing, etc. Leveraging stablecoins enables real-time, cross-border, low-fee settlements and facilitates seamless transaction reconciliation even in scenarios with extremely high transaction volumes.

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03｜Two Tracks, Leading to the Same Destination

If AP2 is an **AI extension of the traditional payment system**, then X402 is more like an **AI-native payment module in the Web3 world**. The convergence of the two precisely represents **the two tracks of AI Payment**: fiat currency payment and crypto payment, both evolving towards being callable by agents.

- AP2: Embeds real-world regulations, risk control, and consumer protection into Agent transactions;

- X402: Embeds Web3's instant settlement and programmability into Agent transactions.

The conclusion is clear: the next stage of AI Payment will not be an either-or scenario, but rather dual-track parallelism and interoperability:

- Users and merchants achieve compliance and trust in AP2;

- Compute power/data/microservices achieve speed and programmability in x402;

- Upper-layer products require unified abstraction to seamlessly orchestrate both tracks for Agent use.

04｜Entrepreneurial Track: Above the Protocol, the Most Missing Executable Layer

Oftentimes, giants start by defining standards to build an ecosystem and influence, but "standards" such as X402 and AP2 are still far from a truly usable AI payment product in a real-world environment, necessitating **building a usable, scalable productized component** above the protocol. This is the direction where entrepreneurs in this track should focus.

In a diagram, a Google engineer summarized the multiple participant roles and responsibilities designed in the Agent payment process. Protocols like AP2 primarily coordinate various parties along the payment chain through credential verification to trust AI Agent payment requests. We can see that AP2 is not the payment execution layer; the execution layer is openly supported by other payment participants.

The Credentials Provider, Merchant Payment Processor, and Network/Issuer constitute the payment execution layer's three major roles. In the era of Agent payments, whether the payment execution layer can give rise to the next trillion-dollar market and players, AI innovation pioneers are seeking answers.

05｜FluxA: Building Mass Production Cars Above the Protocol

FluxA is a set of **AI Native payment execution layers**. The founding team hails from former senior executives at Alibaba and Ant Group and is actively joining this Agent payment competition.

FluxA aims to create an Agent-native payment primitive (**Payment Primitives**), abstracting identity, wallets, and payments into modular primitives. Developers can, like building with building blocks, assemble their Agentic economic services using FluxA's provided components.

The core product of FluxA covers the four essential aspects of AI Agent payment: Identity, Wallet, Acquiring, and Payment Channels.

AI Wallet: Aggregates all AI-invocable payment methods (bank cards, e-wallets, stablecoin wallets, etc.) for AI Agents, providing them with a unified payment gateway. The security and risk control module are key to this AI Wallet, ensuring that AI Agents conduct delegated spending securely under the user's intent.

AI Identity: The AI Wallet inherently provides a trusted AI identity ID for AI Agents, encompassing not only user information authentication but also authentication of the AI Agent execution process. Based on the AI identity provided by FluxA, merchants and payment downstream participants can further enhance risk management, mitigating the risk exposure introduced to provide a programmable interface to AI Agents.

AI Payment: Provides merchants with a service to receive payments from AI Agents. The core idea of FluxA's AI Payment is to aggregate acquiring, consolidate multiple payment channels available to AI Agents, relieving merchants from concerns about AI Agents failing to complete payments. It integrates industry protocols such as AP2, x402, providing a variety of AI-native payment methods.

Stablecoin rail: Stablecoins are still in the early stages of mainstream adoption, with many details in consumer wallets and merchant acceptance needing improvement. FluxA will build a seamless stablecoin channel around mainstream compliance and low-threshold adoption, specifically catering to AI payments.

If Google AP2 and Coinbase x402 have provided the expressway, FluxA aims to be the first batch of mass-produced vehicles on the highway:

- Integrate protocols such as AP2, x402 → Ensure compatibility with global payment standards.

- Provide SDK/API → Allow developers to quickly equip AI with payment capabilities without needing to delve into the underlying protocols.

- Use Case Orientation → Whether it's automatic procurement for B2B SaaS or e-commerce shopping for C2C Agents, FluxA can act as the payment execution layer.

In the early stages of the innovation track, it is often the entrepreneur who takes the first exploration step ahead of the giants. Open protocols have just started, and truly available products in the market are still scarce; on one hand, businesses wish to quickly enable AI to access payments, but they must ensure a fast and orderly process, hence the urgent need for a compliant and auditable landing platform; at the same time, developers are no longer willing to frantically integrate with dozens of gateways or wallets. What they need is a one-stop abstraction layer that makes payment capability as simple and direct as calling an API.

FluxA will not reinvent the protocol but will deeply align, closely following the evolution pace of AP2 and x402, and prioritizing adaptation to mainstream payment service providers and wallet ecosystems. Additionally, FluxA's value lies in filling the gaps, transforming the protocol into truly usable products, turning standards into deployable business capabilities, and internalizing security requirements as default settings. Consequently, the giants are responsible for setting rules and establishing the express lane, while entrepreneurs are the first to launch mass-producible models on this express lane.

Payment itself is a vast ecosystem, and the relationship between startups and giants is not one of opposition but one of complementarity:

- FluxA **does not invent protocols but deeply aligns**. It closely follows the evolution pace of AP2 / x402, prioritizing adaptation to mainstream payment service providers and wallet ecosystems;

- FluxA's value lies in ecological positioning: transforming the protocol into products, turning standards into runnable businesses, turning security requirements into default integrations.

Conclusion: From Conversational to Transactional, the AI Economy Truly Begins

When Google and Coinbase are simultaneously pushing the protocol standards in their respective trajectories, what the market needs is no longer new slogans but the courage to execute and implement first. AP2 provides assurance for compliance and trust, x402 opens up instant settlement and programmable space, and FluxA then transforms these abstract standards and protocols into truly callable payment primitives.

In the next stage of AI Payment, standards and product execution layers will jointly define it. Agents not only need to be empowered but also must be validated and accountable; the payment process is not just a one-time transaction execution but needs to achieve orchestration, observation, and extension; and for developers, the ideal scenario is to be able to quickly integrate and launch AI payment capabilities on a daily basis.

The inflection point has arrived. FluxA hopes to work with ecosystem partners to move the Agent economy from papers and demos to a reliable, usable, and scalable real-world operation.

This article is a contributed piece and does not represent the views of BlockBeats.

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