MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Executives from Google Cloud and PayPal said Thursday at CoinDesk’s Consensus conference in Miami that the next wave of internet commerce will take place 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 open 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 fantastic machine-readable interface for payments,” Widmann said.
To fill this gap, Google launched the Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2), an open protocol that was 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 that 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 after PayPal evolves from offline to online and mobile commerce. PYUSD, the company’s stablecoin, is “a very natural programmable layer for payments,” she said, especially in the context of business trends toward globalization, native AI experiences and tokenized assets.
Zabaneh cited a recent PayPal survey that found that 95% of merchants now see AI agent traffic on their sites, but only 20% have machine-readable catalogs. “Retailers need to be ready for this next era,” she said. This change, she added, reflects the shift from offline to online stores; merchants must display their products in formats readable by agents.
Regarding liability, Zabaneh said the question of who is responsible if an agent makes a bad purchase is “definitely something we need to think about as an industry.” Widmann said multi-party guarding is becoming a central part of agent design. Google has extended its Cloud KMS platform to custody of cryptocurrencies, and Widmann argued that an agent should only hold one of two or three key fragments rather than the full private key. “He can’t just move funds around or take unilateral action,” he said.
When asked what keeps them up at night, Widmann said the open question is “how to integrate agents into all the existing capital markets and infrastructure that powers payments and commerce today.” Zabaneh said confidence keeps her going professionally, although personally, she “can’t wait for an agent to help make my life easier.”
