Author: Blockchain Knight; Source: X, @Knight_in_Block

Mastercard has done something quite imaginative recently. Last night, they officiallyreleased a payment system called Agent Pay for Machines, or AP4M for short, specifically for AI agents.

To put it simply, it isallowing AI programs to pay and receive money by themselves without anyone having to press the confirmation button throughout the process.

Why do you need this?

Because the way AI works has changed. In the past, AI only gave people ideas, but now it can directly start working. For example, if you open a flower shop and want to build a website, you can give your AI a sentence, "Within a budget of $100, complete the domain name, hosting, images, and checkout page."

Then the AI will negotiate, place orders, and pay with multiple services on its own, and each transaction may only cost a few cents. If you use a traditional bank card to do this kind of thing, it is impossible to do it. The frequency is too high, the amount is too small, and it requires repeated authorization.

Mastercard’s chief product officer put it bluntly: “AP4M will allow AI business models to truly prosper. The scale, speed and amount of machine payments are completely different from today’s human payments.”

What role does cryptocurrency play in it?

First, the authorization record is put on the chain. The permissions we set for AI, such as the maximum amount of money it can spend and what types of services it can buy, these rules will be stored on the Polygon blockchain.

Why go on the chain? Because in the future there may be more than one system to verify whether AI has exceeded its authority, and it will be placed on a public ledger so that institutions can check each other without having to rely on a centralized institution for endorsement. Mastercard has currently chosen Polygon for initial deployment.

Second, settlement supports stablecoins. In addition to bank cards and accounts, this network also allows settlement with stablecoins such as USDC, and a bunch of companies in the encryption field such as Coinbase, Ripple, Solana, etc. have participated.

The senior vice president of RippleX said, "Autonomous agents are already settling independently, but only with control can institutions dare to run with confidence. Adding stablecoins to the chain can achieve second-level settlement, programmable compliance, and full-process auditing."

The underlying logic of this system is not complicated. Each agent is issued a verifiable identity (certificated); companies can set programmatic rules (such as a single transaction not exceeding US$0.5); it facilitates high-frequency transactions between agents; and finally cross-channel settlement.

Of course, Mastercard has not abandoned its roots. Instead, it has opened up the global clearing network and embedded encryption as a layer of trust.

Currently, more than 30 companies have expressed support, including Adyen, Ant International, Stripe, Cloudflare, Checkout.com, etc.

The significance of this matter is that traditional payment giants do not bypass the encryption system, but use it as a tool to solve practical problems. High-frequency, micro-amount, automation, and cross-system scenarios cannot be handled by traditional channels, and encryption can just fill in the gaps.

However, some problems still remain. How to prevent abuse of AI authorization boundaries? Who is responsible if the agent makes a mistake?

But these do not hinder the judgment of a trend. Future payments are changing from "people need to click to confirm to make a payment" to "programs to automatically make continuous payments according to rules", and this time Mastercard, as the world's second largest card organization, is ahead.