Highlights

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

- Coinbase teams up with the Ethereum community to introduce x402, making API call-to-pay a reality — native stablecoin support, Agent-to-Agent (A2A) direct transfers.

- Convergence of Two Tracks: Fiat Track (AP2) and Crypto Track (x402) progressing together towards the same goal: an Agent-centric payment semantic layer.

- Start-up Window: The most lacking deployable product components and secure risk control mid-tier above the protocol. FluxA chooses to be one of the first mass-production-ready vehicles on the road.

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

The AI space is perhaps the most relentless battlefield at the moment, with various tech giants engaging in a fierce model-side arms race. Amidst this ongoing competition, a new battlefield — AI payment — is slowly coming to the surface. Stripe has announced the launch of its own Layer 1 payment, Tempo, while Paypal has disclosed its investment in Kite.AI. Just yesterday, Google announced the release of its open-source payment protocol, Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), and its collaboration with Coinbase's previously launched X402 to integrate X402 into Google's in-house A2A framework.

As AI continues to evolve, the industry's contemplation of AI's capability boundaries and commercialization is entering 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 understanding that when Agentic AI becomes a new "first-class citizen" of the Internet, it will disrupt the traditional e-commerce operation, advertising, distribution, and the fundamental logic of Internet finance, giving rise to new AI-centric Agentic Commerce.

This article will provide a deep analysis of the latest advancements from the two major players in the AI payment field: Google's AP2 and Coinbase's X402. Starting from here, we will analyze the development trends in the AI payment field and the opportunities that exist.

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

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

Before AI, traditional payments were completed by a person clicking "Purchase" on the payment backend. Any non-human-initiated, automated payment behavior was considered "unsafe" by the entire payment system. To manage this risk, the payment system has developed a mature risk control system. 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 AI to make this transaction? 2. Whether AI's request represents the user's genuine intent? 3. How to hold AI accountable if issues arise during the transaction?

Google's AP2 tackles this issue by defining an open protocol standard to provide a common language for secure and compliant transactions between AI and merchants. This is essentially based on a dual authorization mechanism between the user, AI, and the merchant:

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

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

Both authorizations are encrypted signed with verifiable credentials and, after user confirmation, form an irrefutable chain of evidence. For merchants and clearing networks, this means they receive payment requests not from an unidentifiable robot but from a user-authorized and verifiable "transaction covenant." Merchants and clearing networks can confidently acknowledge the legitimacy of the transaction and approve it based on the "transaction covenant" defined by Google.

AP2 does not aim to revamp the clearing networks of Visa/ACH/stablecoins, but rather adds a layer of trust semantics on top of them, defining who is spending, based on what authority, and accountability for overages. It attempts to adapt and address the confirmation of AI payment intents in various stablecoin-to-fiat clearing networks. In traditional payment scenarios, each of us manually clicks the "Purchase" button to initiate payments. In the AI and stablecoin era's "dark forest," we need to use cryptography and process constraints to regulate each AI's behavior, ensuring that AI does not misuse its monetary authority 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 the various participants in the Agent payment chain, addressing concerns about the agent potentially misusing funds, a crucial aspect of AI completing payment transactions:

- For Consumers: Yes, AI payments have become the boundary's trust. 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 pre-authorization anti-authorization bypass, post-appealable.

- For Merchants and Payment Networks: Transforming whether it is the person's genuine intention from verbal/interface confirmation into a verifiable encrypted intention credential; chargebacks, dispute resolution with chain evidence, reducing gray losses and compliance uncertainties.

- For the Ecosystem: Establishing a common semantic interface for AI involvement in payments, facilitating collaborative innovation by multiple parties (identity, risk control, clearing and settlement, factoring, etc.) to remain consistent on the same problem definition.

- For Enterprise IT/Compliance: Moving processes such as automatic procurement, subscription expansion, bill payment from policy documents + manual reviews to protocol-level policy execution; auditing shifts from monthly reconciliation to real-time traceability, meeting both internal control and external regulatory requirements.

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

If Google is more focused on the clearing chain and AI payment authorization and security issues, and Coinbase, which is inherently closer to stablecoins and blockchain, is directly linking AI to the transaction itself through the x402 protocol promoted by the Ethereum Foundation, Coinbase is striving to shape stablecoins and blockchain as the native currency and payment primitives of AI payments, coupling AI's payment behavior with "consumption" behavior.

x402 derives its name from HTTP 402, an HTTP status code that signifies "Payment Required." Before the age of AI and stablecoins, this status was almost never standardized in history. In recent years, the rise of AI has shown developers its potential. As more and more web page and API access calls come from AI rather than real people, should AI also pay for their access?

The approach X402 takes to address this issue is to start from the payment link, enabling a native coupling of API calls and payments:

When an AI agent calls a certain service, X402 will, based on the pre-defined payment information by the service provider, respond to the AI agent with a payment "invoice" via HTTP. The AI agent can then use stablecoins like USDC to settle the payment for the service directly on-chain based on this "invoice," and the service provider will immediately release the service to the AI.

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

For an AI agent, X402's presence enables the AI agent to seamlessly integrate service calls and payments, leveraging a decentralized, highly programmable stablecoin network. AI no longer needs to navigate through the human workflow of "linking a credit card—initiating a charge—waiting for channel callback" but can truly achieve instant pay-as-you-go services. Furthermore, unlike humans with relatively low-frequency payment needs, the parallel processing capability allows AI agents to have a much higher payment frequency. X402 makes it more suitable for AI agents to carry out fine-grained, automated micropayments and streaming payments. AI agents do not need to pre-set various accounts and API keys for different services but can automatically negotiate prices when faced with a 402 challenge.

For AI service providers, X402 pushes the "access equals pricing" capability down to the protocol layer. In the future, developers in the X402 ecosystem can create fine-grained pay-as-you-go models for pages, APIs, and data shards, billing based on requests, tokens, duration, and other complex payment structures. Additionally, by leveraging stablecoins for instant, cross-border, low-fee settlement, even in scenarios with extremely high transaction volumes, reconciliations can be easily achieved.

03 | Two Tracks, One Endpoint

If AP2 is an AI extension of the traditional payment system, then X402 is more like a Web3 world's AI-native payment module. The convergence of these two represents the two tracks of AI Payment: fiat payments and crypto payments, both evolving towards Agent-invocable directions.

- AP2: Embeds real-world regulation, risk management, and consumer protection into Agent transactions;

- x402: Embed 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 under AP2;

- Compute/data/microservices gain speed and programmability under x402;

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

04｜Entrepreneur Track: The Most Needed Executable Layer Above the Protocol

Often, giants start by defining standards to build an ecosystem and influence, but "standards" like X402 and AP2 are still far from a truly usable AI payment product in a real-world scenario. It is crucial to build usable, scalable productized components above the protocol. This is the direction entrepreneurs in this track should focus on.

In the diagram, a Google engineer summarized the various participant roles and responsibilities designed in the Agent payment process. Protocols such as AP2 coordinate multi-party validation credentials along the payment path to trust AI Agent payment requests. We can see that AP2 is not the payment execution layer; the execution layer is open to other payment participants' support.

The Credentials Provider, Merchant Payment Processor, and Network/Issuer form the payment execution layer's three main 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-Produced Cars Above the Protocol

FluxA is a set of AI Native payment execution layer. The founding team comprises former executives from Alibaba and Ant Group, fervently joining this Agent payment race.

FluxA aims to create an Agent economy's payment primitives, abstracting identity, wallets, and payments into modular primitives. Developers can assemble their Agentic economic services like building blocks using components provided by FluxA.

FluxA's core product covers the four essential aspects of AI Agent Payments: 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 a unified payment gateway. The security and risk control module are key to this AI Wallet, ensuring that AI Agents engage in delegated spending based on user intent.

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

AI Payment: Provides merchant services to receive payments from AI Agents. The core idea of FluxA AI Payment is to aggregate acquiring, aggregate multiple payment channels available to AI Agents, enabling merchants to not worry about AI agents failing to complete payments. It integrates industry protocols such as AP2, x402, providing diverse 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 user-friendly stablecoin channel around mainstream compliance and low-threshold adoption, specifically serving AI payments.

If Google AP2 and Coinbase x402 have built the expressways, FluxA aims to be the first batch of mass-produced vehicles on these expressways:

- Integration with AP2, x402, and other protocols → Ensure compatibility with global payment standards.

- Provide SDK/API → Enable developers to quickly empower AI with payment capabilities without needing to study underlying protocols.

- Use Case Orientation → Whether it is the automatic procurement of B-side SaaS or e-commerce shopping by C-side 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 step in exploration faster than the giants. Open protocols have just begun, and truly usable products are still scarce in the market. On one hand, enterprises hope to quickly enable AI to access payments, but they must ensure that the process is fast yet orderly. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a compliant and auditable landing mid-layer. At the same time, developers no longer want to exhaust themselves integrating with dozens of gateways or wallets. What they need is a one-stop abstract layer that makes payment capabilities as simple and direct as calling an API.

FluxA will not invent protocols but will deeply align with them, closely following the evolution pace of AP2 and x402, and prioritizing compatibility with mainstream payment service providers and wallet ecosystems. At the same time, FluxA's value lies in filling the gap, transforming the protocol into a truly usable product, turning standards into deployable business capabilities, and internalizing security requirements as default configurations. Consequently, the giants are responsible for setting rules and building high-speed roads, while entrepreneurs are the first to launch mass-producible models on this expressway.

Payment itself is a vast ecosystem, where the relationship between startups and giants is not antagonistic but more complementary:

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

- FluxA's value lies in ecosystem positioning: turning protocols into products, turning standards into operational businesses, and turning security requirements into default integrations.

Conclusion: From Conversation to Transaction, the AI Economy Truly Begins

When Google and Coinbase exert concurrent force on their own tracks, driving the establishment of protocol standards, the market no longer needs new slogans but rather the execution power to dare to be the first to land. AP2 provides guarantees for compliance and trust, x402 opens up real-time settlement and programmable space, and FluxA transforms these abstract standards and protocols into truly callable payment primitives.

In the next stage of AI Payment, standards and execution layer products will jointly define it. Agents not only need to be empowered but also must be verifiable and accountable. The payment process is not just a one-time transfer, but rather orchestration, observation, and scaling. For developers, the ideal state is to be able to quickly integrate and launch AI payment capabilities on a daily basis.

A turning point has arrived. FluxA aims to work with ecosystem partners to take the Agent economy from whitepaper and demo, to a real-world implementation that is reliable, usable, and scalable.

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