Mastercard Enables AI Agent Payments With Help From Crypto Giants Like Coinbase, Ripple

By Jason Nelson

Mastercard on Wednesday announced the launch of Agent Pay for Machines, a payments platform designed to let AI agents transact autonomously using cards, bank accounts, and stablecoins.

According to Mastercard, the platform is designed to let AI systems buy services and send payments on their own, including small transactions that occur in the background. The service expands on the company's Agent Pay program by enabling payments between AI agents, software platforms, and connected machines.

“Agent Pay for Machines will create the conditions for a superbloom of AI business models,” Mastercard Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert said in a statement. “Machine payments can make it possible for services to be bought and sold among agents at fundamentally different scales than payments today—very high volumes, very small values, very fast, and at extremely low latency.”

More than 30 companies have joined the effort, including Coinbase, OKX, Polygon, RippleX, Aave Labs, Alchemy, Anchorage Digital, BVNK, MoonPay, Stripe, Cloudflare, and the Solana Foundation.

The launch marks Mastercard's latest push into AI-powered commerce as companies across the payments and crypto industries—including MoonPay, MetaMask, and Coinbase—explore how autonomous AI agents could eventually buy services and complete transactions without direct human involvement.

The announcement also comes after several moves by Mastercard into the cryptocurrency market this year.

In March, Mastercard launched a Crypto Partner Program with more than 85 companies, including Binance, Ripple, and PayPal, to develop products that combine digital assets with Mastercard's payment network. Later that month, Mastercard agreed to acquire stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, a deal aimed at expanding its capabilities around digital asset payments and settlement.

Mastercard has also spent much of 2026 expanding its stablecoin business. In March, the company joined Solana's enterprise blockchain platform to support stablecoin settlement. Earlier this month, Mastercard expanded its program for settling transactions using regulated stablecoins, including Circle's USDC and Ripple's RLUSD.

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