Mastercard, the card network, unveiled an AI payment system powered by blockchain contracts, the latest example of traditional financial players converging on crypto rails for agentic commerce.
The new setup, called Agent Pay for Machines, allows AI agents to "transact with each other continuously at high velocity, executing chains of transactions, including microtransactions," according to a press release from Purchase, New York-based Mastercard.
Mastercard's new offering comes as a growing herd of blockchain developers, AI firms and traditional financial companies are vying to establish systems and standards for an emerging era where consumers and businesses alike buy services via AI agents. Stripe, Visa and Coinbase have rolled out their own designs.
According to the press release, the Mastercard system will be "credentialed and multi-rail," and the company said it was collaborating with a broad set of commercial partners to "validate priority use cases."
Initial participants included blockchain developers and projects like Aave Labs, Alchemy, Polygon and the Solana Foundation, as well as crypto exchanges Coinbase and OKX and the internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare.
Mastercard released a video promoting Agent Pay for Machines. In it, the narrator says:
Authority is defined up front, and smart on-chain contracts are used to permission and control each agent's ability to spend. Agents can then buy and sell at machine speed, and payments follow a clear path from authorization to settlement across currencies, rails, and chains. Settlement of resulting payment obligations is guaranteed by Mastercard across any rail, currency, or format.
(EDITOR'S NOTE: The first draft of this story was written on Claude Desktop using a custom skill designed to handle press-release rewrites. I then used Distro Publisher, our MCP server, to file a draft directly to DeAI News, and then used the DistroVerse editing interface to make some edits, and to embed the video. I personally checked all the facts prior to publication.)