PayPal and Google Cloud Say Agentic Commerce Will Run on Crypto Rails at Consensus Miami

Senior figures from PayPal and Google Cloud told CoinDesk's Consensus Miami conference on Thursday that the next wave of online commerce will run on crypto rails because AI agents structurally cannot use traditional financial accounts.

“Agentic commerce will run on crypto rails, PayPal and Google reps tell Consensus Miami Senior figures from PayPal and Google Cloud said open payment protocols, machine-readable merchant catalogs and multi-party crypto custody are needed to scale agentic commerce”

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Richard Widmann, global head of Web3 strategy at Google Cloud, said, "An agent cannot get a bank account. It's not hard, it just is impossible," citing technological and regulatory barriers.

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Widmann said Google launched the Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2), an open protocol donated to the FIDO Foundation that now counts more than 120 partners, including PayPal.

May Zabaneh, senior vice president and general manager of PayPal's Crypto division, said PYUSD is "a very natural programmable layer for payments" as commerce moves toward globalization, AI-native experiences, and tokenized assets.

The panelists said scaling agentic commerce requires open payment protocols, machine-readable merchant catalogs, and multi-party crypto custody systems for digital assets.

CoinDesk reported that Zabaneh cited a recent PayPal survey finding 95% of merchants now see AI agent traffic on their sites, but only 20% have machine-readable catalogs.

Zabaneh said, "Merchants need to be ready for this next era," and argued that the shift requires products to be exposed in agent-readable formats.

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Widmann said multipartite custody is becoming central to agent design, and argued that an agent should hold only one of two or three key fragments rather than the full private key.

He said, "It cannot simply move funds or take actions unilaterally," describing how multi-party custody can prevent unilateral actions.

The panelists also framed open standards as foundational, with Widmann comparing AP2 to the internet-native payment standard x402 given to the Linux Foundation.

PayPal and Google Cloud executives tied their crypto-rails vision to concrete infrastructure moves, including Google extending its Cloud KMS platform to cryptocurrency custody.

Widmann said the open question is "how to bring agents into the existing capital markets ecosystem and the infrastructure that today underpins payments and exchanges."

Zabaneh said on liability that the question of who is responsible if an agent makes a bad purchase is "definitely something we have to think about as an industry."

In a separate report, Let's Data Science said senior figures from PayPal and Google Cloud at Consensus Miami argued that open payment protocols, machine-readable merchant catalogs, and multi-party crypto custody are needed to scale agentic commerce.

That same Consensus Miami framing described payments, merchant metadata, and multi-party custody as foundational rails for commerce executed by autonomous software agents.