How AI Agents Will Pay Each Other

The agent economy

AI agents are evolving from tools to economic actors. They browse, negotiate, buy, and sell. But current payment infrastructure was built for humans clicking buttons. Agents need payment rails they can call programmatically.

Five competing standards

In 2025, five agent payment standards emerged:

1. ACP (Stripe) — Agentic Commerce Protocol with OpenAI partnership
2. x402 (Coinbase) — HTTP-native micropayments, crypto-only
3. TAP (Visa) — Tokenized agent credentials
4. AP2 (Google) — 60+ partner standard
5. MCP (Anthropic) — Model Context Protocol, tool-calling standard

Teleport uses MCP because it's the most practical: any AI model can call payment tools natively.

Teleport vs agent payment startups

Skyfire ($9.5M, a16z) — crypto-only agent wallets. Payman AI ($13.8M, Visa+Coinbase) — banking AI agents, US-focused. Teleport — the only one combining crypto + fiat + no entity + 200 countries. See detailed comparisons: Teleport vs Skyfire and Teleport vs Payman AI.

How it works with Teleport

An AI agent connects to Teleport MCP Server. It can create payment links, check balances, convert currencies — all autonomously. No human in the loop. This is the foundation of agent-to-agent commerce. Learn more about our R&D innovations.