MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – Senior people from Google Cloud and PayPal told CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference Thursday that the next wave of internet commerce will ride on crypto rails because AI agents structurally cannot use traditional financial accounts.
Richard Widmann, global head of Web3 strategy at Google Cloud, said the existing Internet user experience does not extend to autonomous agents.
“An agent can’t get a bank account. It’s not difficult, it’s just impossible,” he said, citing technological and regulatory barriers. Crypto, on the other hand, is “a great machine-readable interface for payments,” Widmann said.
To address the gap, Google has launched the Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2), an open protocol that has been donated to the FIDO Foundation and has more than 120 partners including PayPal, Widmann said. He compared the move to the x402 Internet-native payment standard given to the Linux Foundation.
“Open dialogues and open standards are really the foundation you have to build on,” Widmann said.
May Zabaneh, senior vice president and general manager of crypto at PayPal, said the company treats agents as the next channel following PayPal’s evolution from offline to online to mobile commerce. PYUSD, the company’s stablecoin, is “a very natural programmable layer for payments,” she said, especially as trade trends toward globalization, AI-native experiences and tokenized assets.
Zabaneh cited a recent PayPal study which found that 95% of merchants now see AI agent traffic on their sites, but only 20% have machine-readable catalogs. “Merchants need to be ready for this next era,” she said. The shift, she added, reflects the move from offline to online stores; merchants must expose their products in agent-readable formats.
As for liability, Zabaneh said the question of who is responsible if an agent makes a bad purchase is “definitely something we need to think through as an industry.” Widmann said multi-party custody is becoming central to agent design. Google has expanded its Cloud KMS platform for cryptocurrency custody, and Widmann argued that an agent should only have one of two or three key shards instead of the full private key. “It cannot just unilaterally move funds or intervene,” he said.
Asked what keeps them up at night, Widmann said the open question is “how do you get agents on board with all the existing capital markets and infrastructure plumbing that drives payments and trading today.” Zabaneh said that confidence keeps her going professionally, though personally she “can’t wait for the agent to help make my life easier.”
