Alchemy's AgentCard gives AI agents a full Visa identity and payment setup, joining a growing race to build commerce tools for bots.
AI News
Blockchain infrastructure company Alchemy rolled out AgentCard this week, a tool its co-creator says is meant to solve the problem of how hard it is to let agents function in the real world.
An API call hands a developer's agent a Visa payment token, a working email address, a phone number, and a crypto wallet, which the agent needs to sign up for services or pass identity checks, much like a person would.
Related Article: The AI Agent Tech Stack Is Here, and It’s Only Getting More Powerful
Built on Visa's Backbone
The model-agnostic product runs on Visa Intelligent Commerce, Visa's infrastructure for AI-driven transactions, which means agents transacting through AgentCard tap into existing card benefits like rewards programs and credit lines.
Spending isn't unlimited. Developers can lock in merchant restrictions, per-transaction caps, and broader budget limits, offering guardrails on what the bots can actually buy.
Visa tokens serve as the default payment rail, but crypto payments work where merchants accept them, and support extends to newer agent-native protocols, including Coinbase's x402 and Stripe's Machine Payments Protocol.
Related Article:Visa Launches AI Commerce Platform for Agentic Payments
A Crowded New Lane
Alchemy is late to a race that's moving fast. Mastercard introduced its own answer, Agent Pay for Machines, just last week with backing from a wide roster of fintech and crypto partners. MetaMask launched Agent Wallet earlier this month to plug bots into Ethereum, and Tether-backed Oobit already lets agents spend down USDT (USDT) balances through virtual corporate cards.
Alchemy CEO Nikil Viswanathan framed the moment in broader terms, comparing it to how the internet birthed online business and mobile birthed the app economy. His pitch: AI agents are the next class of economic actor, and they need infrastructure built specifically for them.
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