Google took its latest step Tuesday to hasten the arrival of the AI agent economy, announcing the creation of an open-source protocol for agent payments backed by some of crypto’s biggest companies. 

The Agent Payments protocol revealed today can be used as an extension of Google’s previously released Agent2Agent protocol, which attempted to create a standard for interactions between AI agents—automated assistants authorized to zip around the internet completing complex tasks on behalf of humans or organizations.

Today’s announced protocol adds the crucial ingredient of payments to that mix, with the goal of enabling AI agents to seamlessly complete financial transactions with users, merchants, and payments providers.

It is backed both by crypto mainstays like Coinbase and the Ethereum Foundation, as well as traditional payments giants and vendors including PayPal, American Express, and Etsy. Other crypto firms supporting the initiative include Sui creator Mysten Labs, prominent crypto wallet MetaMask, and Eigen Labs, the firm behind Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer.

(Disclaimer: MetaMask is a product of Consensys, one of 22 investors in an editorially independent Decrypt.)

Google said Tuesday its new protocol represents an effort to create a platform- and currency-agnostic “common language for secure, compliant transactions between agents and merchants.” It will support credit and debit card transactions, stablecoins, and real-time bank transfers.

To accelerate the adoption of other digital assets in its AI agent framework, Google has also launched a crypto-specific extension for its Agent2Agent protocol, dubbed x402. 

The Ethereum Foundation was one of numerous crypto organizations that contributed to the x402 extension, which it says will complement its own efforts to make Ethereum the bedrock of the booming AI agent economy. The Ethereum Foundation is currently finalizing ERC-8004, a standard for agents to discover, verify, and transact with each other on the network, which was backed by members of Google’s Agent2Agent team. 

“ERC-8004 will support many forms of payments, but having the x402 extension helps the developer experience,” Davide Crapis, head of the Ethereum Foundation’s newly announced AI team, told Decrypt. “Beyond the ERC, x402 is getting adoption, so this extension opens up a new avenue for agents built on crypto rails.”

Crapis added that today’s announcement from Google is aligned with his team’s goal of creating better infrastructure for agentic interaction on Ethereum.

“It’s exciting to see the idea of agents paying each other resonate with the broader AI community,” Erik Reppel, head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform, said Tuesday in a statement. “Bringing x402 into AP2 to power stablecoin payments made sense—it’s a natural playground for agents to start transacting with each other and testing out crypto rails.”