As AI agents increasingly carry out autonomous transactions, purchases and actions online – a market that could reach $3 trillion to $5 trillion by 2030 – a key question arises: how to verify that a real person is behind this activity.
Identity Project World (formerly WorldCoin), backed by Sam Altman, claims to have the solution.
On Tuesday, the company rolled out AgentKit, a developer toolkit that allows AI agents to carry cryptographic proof that they are backed by a unique human, using its World ID system. The product works with x402, a protocol developed by Coinbase and Cloudflare that enables “agent payments” by integrating stable micropayments into the communications layer of the Internet so that AI agents and software can pay each other without human intervention.
“Payments are the ‘how’ of agent commerce, but identity is the ‘who,’” said Erik Reppel, head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform and founder of x402. “This is a big step toward a web where agents are seen not just as automated traffic, but as legitimate economic actors.”
The move comes as AI agents scale rapidly, handling time-consuming and often frustrating tasks from booking to navigating e-commerce marketplaces to find the best deals. Some estimates suggest that agent commerce could reach between $3 trillion and $5 trillion by 2030, with agents accounting for as much as 25% of U.S. e-commerce, World said.
Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong said he believes “very soon” there will be more AI agents than humans making transactions. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao went further, predicting that agents will make a million times more payments than people, “and they will use crypto.”
The missing piece
However, as the agent commerce market grows, its widespread use creates a problem that payments alone cannot solve: identity.
“A single person could run thousands of agents who would all pay small fees,” said DC Builder, a research engineer at the World Foundation. “Proof of Human fills this gap. »
The World spokesperson explained that AgentKit solves this problem by linking multiple agents to a single verified human, allowing platforms to impose limits on identity.
“AgentKit allows developers to link multiple agents to the same verified human,” the spokesperson said. “This means that a platform can allow someone to run multiple agents while enforcing limits based on the underlying person.”
This could allow services to limit their usage, such as a free trial or a fixed number of bookings per day per human, regardless of the number of agents deployed, the spokesperson added.
Another problem with agent trading is that most websites treat automated traffic as suspicious and even block bots outright. This approach, designed to stop abuse, is increasingly at odds with a world in which legitimate software agents increasingly act on behalf of the user.
AgentKit allows users to delegate their global identifier, a privacy-respecting proof that they are a unique human being, to AI agents acting on their behalf. And World is not positioning this as a replacement for other identity systems, but as a foundational layer.
“It’s not necessarily an either/or choice,” a World spokesperson told CoinDesk. “World ID is designed to be a human layer proof that developers can use alone or with other identity systems.”
The system uses zero-knowledge proofs so platforms can verify that an agent represents a real person without collecting or storing personal data, a design World says is necessary to scale identity in an AI-driven web.
Verification beyond the Orb
AgentKit, currently in beta, relies on Orb-based biometric verification, the world’s most controversial component.
But the company says it plans to expand the system to include additional identifying information. This will include NFC-enabled passports and IDs through “World ID Credentials”, allowing users to prove their attributes without revealing personal information.
“Beyond beta, we plan to expand AgentKit alongside the next generation of the World ID protocol,” the spokesperson said.
With a real-time human verification tally of 17,912,203 at the time of writing, its networks rank among the largest personality proofs in the world. It also makes clear their broader ambition: to become the identity layer of an Internet increasingly populated not only by people, but also by AI agents acting on their behalf.
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