7 Projects Building the Payment Rails for the Agent Economy

Reading time: 6m 13s

There’s an old adage that goes, “adapt or die.” 

The world is currently building for an AI-centric future. You may not like it, you may be disillusioned by it, but there’s also no point in fighting it. Plus, things may not be as dystopian as mainstream media would have you believe. 

As every crypto native slowly crawls their way back to the trenches, there are bigger things brewing behind the scenes, specifically from an institutional front. 

• Stripe acquired Privy 
• Stripe acquired Bridge 
• Mastercard acquired BVNK
• Visa’s stablecoin settlement pilot hit a $7 billion run rate

Let’s read between the lines. 

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When the incumbents start buying wallet infrastructure so aggressively and begin setting up infrastructure for onchain payment systems, it’s not about “testing and experimenting,” the land grab is well and truly on. 

They see how big the pie is going to be and are making sure that they set themselves up to capture the biggest piece of it. 

These institutions already have the TradFi payments system on lock, but the recent capitulation onto crypto rails suggests they notice a new world order emerging. 

The next billion users are not humans, it’s AI agents. Traditional rails simply cannot serve them. 

Card numbers, OTPs, 3D secure, checkout pages, chargebacks, and so on. All these systems assume a person is behind the screen. 

On top of that, take a company like Stripe, they charge $0.30 per transaction. Imagine an agent making thousands of API calls an hour but paying $0.30 per transaction. It simply doesn’t work. 

For context, in 2025, the average spend of an agent per transaction was roughly $0.31. So TradFi would eat 97% of the median agent spend per transaction. Yeah, nice one! 

With institutions well and truly digging their toes into the crypto payment rails sand, today we’re going to look at some of the players that are still independent and potentially investable for mere plebs like us. 

PayAI Network 

PayAI is an x402 facilitator. 

For those of you who don’t know, an x402 facilitator is basically the onchain equivalent of a payments processor (like Stripe). 

A facilitator automatically verifies payment cryptographic payloads from clients and settles these payments onchain so websites can easily charge for things like API access when your agent is making 4000 calls an hour. 

PayAI supports all the major chains and is gaining momentum with a total of 35.8 million transactions processed and $6.5 million in volume. 

Although it’s still not on the same level as Coinbase’s facilitator at the moment, the fight is on. 

Kite AI 

Kite AI is a purpose-built L1 for agentic payments. 

There are three layers to Kite:

• Agent interface - This is the top layer that runs the agent workflows, allows developers to build agents and integrations via SDKs, and allows users to discover. 
• Core agent services - Contains the agent passport, which is an identity and wallet system that lets agents spend within user-defined limits. Other things like agent budget, operations, and scope can also be set here. 
• Kite Chain - This is the settlement layer with sub-second finality, full EVM compatibility, and low transaction fees. 

They raised $35 million from the likes of PayPal, General Catalyst, Coinbase Ventures, Samsung, and Animoca, among others. 

Their launch partners include the likes of Google (A2P), PayPal (PYUSD), and Coinbase (x402). 

So yeah, pretty impressive. 

Eco 

Another major issue within this sector is the sheer number of stablecoins that are available in the world of crypto. Each has differing levels of liquidity across different chains. 

Requiring agents to figure out for themselves which stablecoin is the best to use for a specific purpose adds a lot more complexity when building the agent and also opens up room for technical errors or hallucinations that can end up resulting in significant losses. 

Eco is a stablecoin orchestration/routing solution. 

It is the current market leader in stablecoin orchestration and makes it efficient for agents or other machines to use stablecoins. This way, your agent continues to work in a situation where a $0.001 inference call can’t pay a $0.05 gas fee. 

Crossmint 

Crossmint is one of the most complete full-stack solutions for agent wallets. 

It offers:

• Embedded wallets for users or AI agents 
• Treasury wallets to automate company treasury management 
• An orchestration layer to manage stablecoin payments globally with instant settlement 
• An embedded plug-and-play onramp 
• A simple off-ramp to switch to local currencies 
• A token checkout interface to buy digital assets with fiat 
• Virtual cards in partnership with Visa and Mastercard for AI agents 

The selling point is simple: an all-in-one API for all your agentic payment needs. 

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Thirdweb 

‍Thirdweb is an infrastructure provider that spans multiple verticals. They offer a launchpad, bridging, and embedded wallets, but they also offer agent wallets that can trade and execute onchain. 

Recently, they also added an x402 integration for pay-per-call crypto payments for things like APIs, token-gated premium actions, metered data access, compute resources, and pretty much anything else that fits the bill. 

They’ve been in the game for a while and have a credible reputation, especially in the EVM infrastructure world. 

FluxA 

FluxA is a full-stack payment layer for AI agents. 

The core product is a co-wallet: you sign one budget mandate, your agent spends freely within it, and a wallet-level risk engine blocks anything off-mission, removing the per-transaction approval taps that make micropayments unusable. 

Around that sits AgentCard for single-use virtual cards where stablecoins are accepted, while AgentCharge plus Monetize on the earn side let developers charge agents for API and MCP access in USDC with one line of code. 

Underpinning it all is AEP2, FluxA's open protocol that embeds payment mandates directly into x402, A2A, or MCP calls and batches settlement with ZK proofs to keep sub-cent payments economical. 

PaymanAI

PaymanAI is building a platform for financial institutions to deploy agent-driven transactions directly into their existing workflows. 

The current targets are banks and credit unions. What Payman offers is direct agent integration, so AI will do things like execute transactions in-app, leave an audit trail, execute transfers, grow deposits with automated plans, and much more. 

There will always be a kill switch, and the company has complete authority over the risk controls to ensure nothing goes beyond their scope with the agent. 

They raised $13.8 million from the likes of Visa, Circle, Coinbase, and a couple of other big names. 

Concluding thoughts

The caveat that rightfully concerns most people with agnetic payment systems is the scale of it. Hundreds of millions of transactions processed usually result in only a couple of million in volume in true-dollar terms. 

This may make it seem “not worthwhile” to many people, but you really have to look at the bigger picture here. 

It’s still very early days when it comes to AI agents or machine-to-machine payments. We’ve barely scratched the surface of how aggressively they can/will be implemented in our lives.

So, although the dollar value may not seem glorious at the moment, you have to think longer-term because the scale is virtually infinite. Imagine a company running 100 agents, each making 5000 calls an hour and paying $0.001 per transaction. That’s not a lot ($120) per day. 

But then you extrapolate it and imagine every company in every country doing the same thing, and the pennies start adding up. On top of that, you add on other sorts of digital stablecoin-based payments, and the numbers start to look a whole lot better. 

The important part here is to be on the ground floor and own a meaningful part of the infrastructure before the agentic economy truly takes off. 

Most companies have already woken up to this, and the projects listed here are just a couple we shortlisted that we think are interesting. There are, of course, a lot more out there, and we will continue to keep you updated on this relatively overlooked sector. \

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