Nevermined

I have been mapping the emerging agentic commerce stack. One thing is now clear: there won't be one stack. Google is furthest along on the merchant side: UCP launched at National Retail Federation in January with Shopify, Walmart, Target and 20+ endorsers, with AP2 handling authorization. OpenAI and Stripe built ACP, though OpenAI retired in-chat checkout in March and moved back to discovery: the protocol survived, but not the product. Coinbase and Cloudflare took x402 to the The Linux Foundation. Visa and Mastercard are building agent credentials, mandates and network-level trust. PayPal extended its merchant network into agentic checkout on top of ACP. Stripe, Visa and Mastercard appear in more than one of those lists. These are not competing products. They are layers. Now it's less about which payment rail wins, but about which control points stay valuable regardless of rail. Machine commerce is high-frequency and programmatic, across APIs, datasets, compute and other agents. Stablecoins and x402 fit part of that: programmable, global, always-on, viable at low ticket sizes. x402 daily settlement volume is down sharply this year, and a large share of remaining activity is test and gamified traffic. The standard is real. The commercial volume is not there yet. Yet traditional rails are not disappearing: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and PayPal are all building hard for the same future. Multi-rail is the base case, not a transition state. Which brings me to the layer I find most interesting: the economic record. A card network sees its own rail. A PSP sees its own merchant flow. A stablecoin network sees settlement. None of them sees the full relationship: Who authorized the agent? What was it allowed to spend? What service was consumed, at what price? How much was actually used? Was the entitlement delivered? Which rail settled it? The obvious objection: Cloudflare already prices and meters at the edge and now funds agents with Wallets, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) shipped AgentCore Payments in May. Both are real. Both are also platform-scoped: they answer these questions for whatever runs on them. The cross-rail, cross-platform version of that record is a different asset, and it is the one that can eventually support attribution, reputation, disputes and spend optimization. That's where we see Nevermined: the commerce-logic layer between agent intent and settlement: pricing, metering, spending policy, entitlements, and a transaction record that holds across rails. Agentic commerce is one of the first genuinely machine-native markets, where AI, payments and blockchain infrastructure have to converge rather than coexist. Two things I'm watching from here: whether real, non-test x402 volume starts compounding, and whether anyone else tries to own the record layer.

$5 buys 1,000 You.com web searches. The same $5 buys ten exhaustive finance research reports. That 100x spread is why we are so excited about this partnership. We partnered with You.com so AI agents can buy their own API access with a delegated credit card. The agent provisions or tops up a key inside limits a human set in advance, then keeps working. You.com is not a retrieval API you call a thousand times for pennies. Their research APIs run across 400+ sources and return cited reports over licensed data including S&P Global, scoring 87.29% on FinSearchComp. Built for consultants, analysts and researchers whose work gets audited. Why this gets more relevant every month: • Agent work is getting expensive. The agent chooses how deep to go on each request, and the deepest research tier costs more than forty times the lightest. At the top of that range, a single Finance Research call is fifty cents. • When a call costs half a cent, a spending limit hardly matters. When it costs fifty cents and produces a report a portfolio manager will act on, the limit is what makes it safe to run at all. • The work also runs longer than anyone is awake for. Overnight and scheduled jobs rarely fail on reasoning. They fail on a key that ran out at 2am. What changes: • A run starts without staging every key first • The agent escalates to a deeper research tier mid-task instead of handing work back to a person • Nights, weekends and scheduled jobs finish instead of pausing • Credentials stop being something you hand-manage as you scale What does not change: • Your corporate card, your processor, your spend policy, your statement • No balance to fund, no new payment rail for security to review • Every authorization stays a dated record with an owner, an amount and a scope • The agent never sees a card number, never opens an account, never types a password Consider what is actually being authorized. You are letting software decide, without asking first, how much of your money a question is worth. Almost nobody signs off on that in the abstract. They sign off on a bounded version: this much, for this long, scoped to this key, and no further. So the limit is not something added on to make this safe. It is the reason anyone allows it at all. You.com also published the payment route in their llms.txt, so an agent can find it without being told it exists. A payment option an agent cannot find is one it will never use, and most merchants miss this entirely. Congratulations to the You.com team. They join a quickly growing list of merchants taking payment directly from agents. Live in production. Integration guide below.

"Best event I went to all conference.” I heard a version of this from everyone who came to our Agentic Payments Dinner at Money20/20 Europe. When the whole industry is competing for your time, that’s the highest praise we can hope to get. Two weeks ago in Amsterdam, Nevermined and VGS broke bread with a group of likeminded new friends. Around one table sat those from NVIDIA, Thoughtworks, Catena Labs, Reach, Ovra, Bending Spoons, Mesh, SolvaPay and Capco. Breaking bread and chatting Agents and Agentic Payments. Intimate conversations and side quests. All of us building the agent economy from very different angles. It was a few hours of the kind of conversation you really can’t schedule a meeting for. A special thanks to everyone at the table:  - Pahal Patangia and - Dr. Jochen Papenbrock   - Giacomo Rebecchi  - Viggo Stenseth  - Alla Gancz  - Martin Henke  - Matt Venables  - Rani E. Nagpal  - Deepak Malhotra  - Tim Jamboula  - Robin Doble  - Austin Clark and Damijan Pezdiček    For the curious, some of the things we actually talked about:  - How agents will reimagine procurement, with businesses buying through agents instead of portals and purchase orders.  - Why the AI control plane becomes central to ROI, because you cannot capture the value of agents without governing what they can do and spend.  - How agents will scale GDP once software can transact and not just recommend. - How to actually pronounce Catena...thanks for clearing that up Matt. ;) By design, there were no panels. There were no pitches. Just people early to the same idea, comparing notes on where we are and where it goes. That was the whole point. I would be remiss to not send out a huge thank you to our co-hosts at VGS, especially Damijan Pezdiček. The agent economy is being built in rooms like this, by people willing to have the conversation before the market catches up. Let's do it again. If you were there, drop your favorite moment of the night below.

Always great to gather likeminded people defining the future of machine-to-machine payments. Money20/20 provided with the opportunity to be in the room with all the right people! And as always, happy to have VGS as a trusted partner in this 🤝

What a day! 🤝 Proud to be in the room where things are happening!

Excited to be part of the ecosystem supporting Mastercard's Agent Pay for Machines, focusing on implementing agent-to-agent payment use cases, establishing common rules, and accelerating adoption 🚀 More to come!

Agents can search. Agents can plan. Now agents can pay. We're co-hosting an evening with Exa, Coinbase, and Visa on the payment stack for the agentic web, and it's already live. Nevermined and Exa just closed the loop: an agent can buy Exa Search API calls autonomously, no human in the middle, no API key handoff, just cardholder-defined guardrails. Hear from the people building it: Coinbase, Visa, Exa, and Nevermined The panel will be followed by a demo and networking. If you're a dev using a harness and to give your agents spending power or a merchant looking to sell to agents, this is for you. RSVP https://luma.com/ktmwwf72

Twelve months ago, agentic commerce was a thesis. Today, every major payment network is live. Visa Intelligent Commerce. PayPal Agentic Checkout. Mastercard Agent Pay. Stripe Link for Agents. All shipped in the last two quarters. Now the first wave of agentic merchants, like Exa, are using Nevermined to enable AI agents to autonomously buy their AI services using a delegated credit cards, no human in the loop. The standards layer is done. The commerce layer above the rails is the next surface. That's the conversation we're hosting at Money20/20 Europe in two weeks. Nevermined + VGS are co-hosting a private dinner for the founders, operators, investors and institutions actually shipping in this category. Join me, Robin Doble, Damijan Pezdiček and Austin Clark for deep conversations and insights into the new merchant and consumer class. Curated guest list. Concrete proof points. No hand-waving. Want a seat at the table? Register here: https://luma.com/a6pito95 #AgenticCommerce #Money2020 #AIAgents

The AI Agents market is projected to grow from $7.84 billion in 2025 to $52.62 billion by 2030, registering a 46.3% CAGR. We're partnered with Visa and integrated with x402 to unlock the agent economy and its potential. Boston Consulting Group (BCG) projects that the agentic commerce market could grow at an average annual rate of about 45% from 2024 to 2030. The numbers are consistent. The trajectory is clear. But most organizations are focused on consumer-facing shopping agents. The larger opportunity is infrastructure. Before AI agents can book your flight or reorder paper towels, they need to pay for the APIs, data feeds, and compute that power those actions. That's the invisible layer, and it's where real volume will flow. The payment friction that x402 addresses shows up wherever AI agents need to access third-party data or services as part of an automated workflow AWS. In capital markets, trading agents need real-time data feeds. In lending, decisioning agents pull bureau data and income verification. In logistics, autonomous systems negotiate with vendors. All of this requires payments infrastructure that doesn't exist in traditional rails. Nevermined is building that layer: programmable payment rails that enable AI agents to transact autonomously while maintaining security, compliance, and auditability. Galaxy estimates that agentic commerce could represent $3–5 trillion in B2C revenue by 2030. But the nearer opportunity is the software-to-software transaction layer. This is where infrastructure stops being theoretical and becomes essential. Are you building for the next wave, or waiting for it to arrive? Let’s chat if you want to accept AI agents as customers.