Author: Prathik Desai Translation: Shan Oppa, Golden Finance

In March this year, OpenAI shut down an AI shopping function. Five months after the feature was launched, only 30 Shopify merchants have accessed it. The problem does not lie in the underlying payment structure, but in the complete lack of supporting rules: which goods can be purchased by the agent, who collects sales tax, how to identify fraudulent transactions, and who is responsible for after-sales returns. There are no clear standards for a series of links.

It is not difficult to configure a wallet and build a payment channel for an AI agent, but it is difficult for individuals and companies to trust the agent to handle funds on their behalf while achieving compliance supervision. Only by relying on a programmable rule system can a trustworthy usage environment be built. The gap in regulatory rules has become a new opportunity in the intelligent economy.

Last year, AI agents completed a total of US$73 million in transactions, with a cumulative number of 176 million transactions. The scale may seem small now, but McKinsey predicts that by 2030, AI agents will handle $3 to $5 trillion in consumer transactions globally.

Companies that have laid out this track are competing to seize the right to speak at the level of regulatory rules. This level includes core capabilities such as consumption limit control, identity verification, and rule execution, which determine which agents can obtain fund use permissions.

This article will sort out the various forces currently building a financial system for intelligent agents and analyze the value that can be gained by leading this field.

Core logic of multi-layer layout

The profit margin of AI intelligent payment is very slim. Over the past year, its average size per transaction was just $0.31.

Let’s do some math: a transaction of $0.31 has very little profit left after being circulated through multiple layers of institutions. At Stripe’s standard rate (2.9% fee + $0.3 flat fee), merchants end up getting less than 0.1 cent; Visa’s interchange fee adds another third. In contrast, the stablecoin payment channel of the encrypted second-layer network only costs $0.0001 to process similar transactions.

Such a cost difference gives encryption solutions a natural advantage at the transaction settlement layer.

At present, the infrastructure of the transaction settlement layer is basically mature. The vast majority of the 176 million smart transactions last year were completed through Coinbase’s x402 protocol, and about 3,900 merchants now support smart payments. Stripe and Tempo jointly launched the competing product protocol Machine Payment Protocol (MPP), which was launched in March this year and has access to more than 100 services. During the same period, Google, Visa, and Mastercard also launched smart payment products. In just one year, the five major payment systems have competed on the same stage.

But it’s simply not possible to achieve high profits just by processing small transactions of $0.31. The real value of the industry is concentrated in the two major sectors of capital accumulation income and payment rule management and control.

Last week we analyzed that companies can obtain benefits by controlling the wallet layer that stores intelligent stablecoin assets, and capital precipitation is only one source of value. The rule system that regulates the use of funds has greater potential.

This set of rules covers consumption limits, agent identity authentication, policy implementation, transaction auditing, and division of responsibilities for transaction failures. At present, this field is still in the blue ocean stage.

In April this year, American Express launched intelligent shopping protection insurance to specifically compensate for losses caused by AI intelligent agents’ mistaken consumption. This also proves from the side that the current regulatory system for AI agents is still imperfect. In this market, which is expected to exceed trillions of dollars in scale within five years, huge commercial value can be mined by filling regulatory gaps.

This is also the core reason why traditional giants are scrambling to lay out rules and regulations.

As for where the rule system should be built? Banks, developer application programming interfaces, and even digital wallets have all become alternative directions.

Build a regulatory system with wallet as the core

Every expenditure made by the agent must go through the wallet, which makes the wallet the best level to implement consumption limits, identity verification, and manual approval. Controlling the wallet is equivalent to having regulatory power. Payment infrastructure giant Stripe understood this early.

In June 2025, Stripe acquired Privy, which focuses on embedded wallet development. With this, Stripe has captured a total of 75 million wallet resources distributed among more than a thousand development teams. Before all funds are transferred, consumption rules, quota limits, manual review and other requirements can be enforced at this critical node.

Stripe has also built a complete intelligent payment technology stack: it acquired the Bridge platform, which is responsible for stablecoin scheduling and fiat currency exchange; it teamed up with Paradigm to incubate Tempo, a public chain focusing on payment scenarios, and jointly launched the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP) to develop universal standards for intelligent agent initiation, authorization, settlement and payment.

Today, Stripe, a financial system for intelligent agents, can support full-process operations such as balance inquiry, bill payment, fund storage, virtual card issuance, transfer and remittance, etc. The agent can automatically perform routine payments and automatically hand over the payment to manual review once the operation exceeds the preset rules. Its capital account is built on Privy non-custodial wallet, and its business covers more than 150 countries and regions.

Even when Amazon opened up its AI agent payment permissions, it chose two wallet service providers, Privy and Coinbase, instead of traditional financial institutions such as banks and card organizations. The wallet service provider, which was born only five years ago, stands out precisely because the wallet is an ideal risk control level and can flexibly set up manual intervention nodes and implement various regulatory verifications.

Research institute Keyrock pointed out in the report "Who Pays for the Agents" that the final form of intelligent agent business will tend to be a compromise model: agents have a high degree of autonomy and are demarcated by encryption rules, and humans can audit and revoke their operating authority at any time.

Privy is playing the role of demarcating the boundaries of rules in the Stripe system.

Privy has designed two operating modes for the agent wallet: the first mode allows the agent to fully control the wallet and automatically complete transactions within the rules without manual approval. It is suitable for fully autonomous agents such as trading robots and asset portfolio management; the second mode is for users to hold ownership of the wallet and only grant the agent limited permissions for signature operations, and the user can withdraw the permissions at any time.

Stripe’s MPP protocol also follows similar regulatory logic.

MPP launches the session authorization function to adapt to high-frequency agent transaction scenarios: users set a consumption limit in advance, and the agent can continuously complete multiple on-chain payments within the limit without the need to apply for authorization individually one by one. The agreement also supports refined settlement models such as U.S.-level billing and data interface pay-per-use for large language model inference services.

This kind of extremely fine-grained management and control capabilities cannot be achieved by traditional bank card organizations.

Full stack vertical layout competition

Currently Coinbase’s x402 protocol takes the lead in the field of smart payment, but Privy relies on Stripe to form unique channel barriers.

Data shows that there are about 3,900 Coinbase merchants that support smart payment, and the number of Stripe partner merchants is nearly a thousand times that. Privy once said that as long as all Stripe merchants access the machine payment function and rely on its wallet ecosystem, the scale of smart business will explode. Merchants do not need to build additional dedicated encryption infrastructure.

The competition between Stripe and Coinbase is becoming increasingly fierce, and other traditional giants are also making efforts to deploy vertically along the industry chain.

Keyrock divides the smart payment system into six layers: settlement layer, wallet layer, routing layer, protocol layer, supervision layer, and application layer, and counts a total of 179 related projects across the track.

Among them, Coinbase and Stripe both cover five of the six levels, Circle covers four levels; Google only has two levels, and Visa has only one.

In the past year, traditional giants have spent more than US$8 billion to make up for the shortcomings of the industry chain: Capital One spent US$5.15 billion to acquire the native AI platform Brex; Mastercard acquired BVNK for US$1.8 billion. The acquisition targets are mainly focused on the wallet layer and AI software layer: Stripe acquires Privy, Fireblocks acquires Dynamic, and Arbitrum acquires ZeroDev. A series of acquisitions point to the same trend: payment infrastructure companies are deploying independent wallet service providers.

This series of actions releases a clear signal: transaction settlement services have become homogenized and profits are meager, while rule-related businesses such as authority control, quota allocation, and responsibility definition are the core of value.

Vertical integration of the industrial chain will also produce a compound interest effect.

The main body that controls the risk control level can formulate rules for the use of funds, earn accumulated income from funds, select cooperative merchants and intelligent applications, and collect handling fees based on various services. The channel barriers built by Stripe and Privy are a typical case.

The layout logic of Coinbase is the same: every x402 protocol payment will drive the demand for USDC on its second-layer network Base, thereby generating capital precipitation income. This revenue feeds back its agent tool suite, AgentKit, which has built-in multiple control rules such as session limits, single transaction limits, and whitelist contracts. The more agents connected to AgentKit, the greater the transaction volume of x402, and each business sector forms a positive cycle.

The investment layout of traditional giants goes far beyond this.

Coinbase Ventures has invested in three leading independently regulated startups: Catena Labs, Skyfire, and Payman. Catena was founded by the co-founders of Circle, which also invested in Skyfire, and venture capital firm a16z also invested in these two companies. Visa invested in Payman and partnered with Skyfire.

A group of leading companies that have built payment and settlement infrastructure are now collectively increasing the level of supervision and regulation. Its strategic thinking is clear: if the regulatory function is eventually embedded in existing infrastructure (such as Privy's dual-mode architecture), existing giants can maximize revenue; even if the regulatory layer develops into an independent track, it can also share dividends through investment layout.

Controlling the business value of regulators

Simply processing payment services has never been the highest value link in the industry chain. Once the underlying financial channels become homogeneous, the focus of profits will shift to businesses related to transaction approval and transaction constraints.

Many industries have experienced this evolution.

In the early days of Internet popularization, wired network infrastructure gradually became homogeneous, and various network service providers lost their differentiated competitiveness. To this end, telecommunications companies have launched vertical business expansion. India's two major telecom operators, Jio and Airtel, package TV channels, streaming memberships, unlimited calls, set-top boxes, routers and other services into broadband packages; AT&T even spent $85 billion to acquire Time Warner, integrating high-quality content such as HBO, Warner Bros., and CNN with its own huge channels, and benchmarking streaming media platforms such as Netflix and Amazon.

When the basic infrastructure of broadband no longer has a profit advantage, the value will flow to content services, user relationships and comprehensive benefit packages.

A similar story has unfolded in the encryption industry.

Transaction settlement is a function of the underlying protocol, and Ethereum is a recognized universal settlement public chain. After Coinbase launched the second-layer network Base, it gained revenue from the handling fees of each transaction on the chain. The current annual revenue of the ordering nodes of the Base network is approximately US$60 million.

Companies that are laying out the smart payment track have also learned from this development path.

We mentioned in the article "Income Precipitated by Agent Funds" that controlling the stablecoin assets between agent transactions can open up new sources of income, which is also the core value of the wallet layer. The regulatory rules layer can create another or even higher income.

Visa has $14.2 trillion in annual payments transaction volume and a combined rate of 0.28%. This revenue includes not only transaction processing fees, but also hidden regulatory service fees such as risk control and fraud prevention, dispute resolution, and network rule maintenance.

With reference to this logic, we can estimate the huge potential of the regulatory layer in the intelligent business. According to McKinsey’s predictions, the scale of smart agent transactions will reach US$3 trillion in 2030. Even charging a regulatory fee of just 0.1% (about three-and-a-half percent of Visa's rate) would bring in annual revenue of $3 billion. For comparison, Coinbase's total subscription and service revenue for 2025 will be approximately $2.8 billion. In other words, the regulatory service revenue from intelligent agent trading alone is expected to equal the sum of Coinbase’s current pledge, asset custody, membership services and other businesses.

If a company deploys the three core levels of wallet, settlement, and supervision at the same time, it can obtain triple benefits: financial income from the idle funds of the agent, transaction settlement fees, and rule compliance service fees.

This also means that vertical integration of the entire industry chain will become the only business model for enterprises to maintain competitiveness in the era of intelligent agents.