BlockBeats News, June 10th - Mastercard announced the launch of a new protocol called Agent Pay for AI, enabling AI agents to pay each other and conduct micropayments. For example, an AI agent can automatically make payments when retrieving segmented data from a website. The permissions granted by humans to AI agents are stored on the blockchain, initially using the Polygon network to ensure transparency and verifiability, allowing multiple parties to verify if the agent is acting as instructed. Companies such as Adyen, Coinbase, and Cloudflare are collaborating with Mastercard to develop this protocol.

Mastercard's Chief Product Officer, Jorn Lambert, stated that the protocol will not be a significant revenue driver in the short term but is expected to evolve into a meaningful new market in the next five years. Industry giants like Visa, Stripe, Coinbase, and Google are actively positioning themselves in the AI payment protocol space, driving towards a future of "machine-to-machine payments" and AI chatbots leading e-commerce transactions, although agent-based payments currently represent a small share.