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Alchemy's AgentCard Enables AI-Powered Payments Through Visa

Alchemy connects AI agents to Visa through AgentCard so they can make purchases on their own. Here’s how identity and payments come together.

By Mike Hesp
• 2 min read
Alchemy's AgentCard Enables AI-Powered Payments Through Visa

Key Takeaways

  • Alchemy has launched AgentCard, giving AI agents full identity and payment capabilities through Visa.
  • With AgentCard, AI agents can make online purchases on behalf of consumers, like booking vacations, ordering groceries, and renewing subscriptions.
  • The move shows how AI, blockchain, and traditional payment networks are working more closely together in agentic commerce.

Blockchain infrastructure company Alchemy announced that its AI agents using AgentCard now have access to the Visa network, including full identity and payment capabilities. This lets these AI agents make online purchases for consumers without the consumer having to handle a checkout page themselves.

AgentCard and agentic commerce

AgentCard acts like a virtual ID and payment card for AI agents, letting them use Visa Intelligent Commerce to book vacations, order groceries, or renew subscriptions, for example. This technology is part of the growing agentic commerce trend, where AI agents carry out transactions on their own. Big players like Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard are investing heavily in this new market.

AgentCard works with AI agents built on models from different providers, including OpenAI and Anthropic. Through the Visa integration, agents can complete transactions with Visa-issued tokens, giving them access to existing perks like rewards and credit lines without needing to open new accounts. AgentCard's routing layer automatically picks the best payment method for each transaction and can fall back to one-time tokens if agent-native protocols are not supported.

Coinbase recently made a similar move with special accounts for bots that can trade and pay on behalf of users, showing how fast this market is evolving. AI agents are also getting their own payment and access rights more often, like in Coinbase Introduces Special Accounts for AI Bots to Trade and Pay on Behalf of Users.

AI agent identity and functionality

Every agent created through AgentCard gets its own email address on the agentcard.email domain and a new phone number. That completes the identity layer needed to sign up for services, receive verification, and operate with the same legitimacy as a human. This setup makes it possible for AI agents to take part in digital payments smoothly.

Why this matters for the European crypto market

The rise of agentic commerce with technologies like AgentCard could also be interesting for European crypto fans. It shows how blockchain infrastructure and AI are becoming more tightly linked with traditional payment networks, opening up new possibilities for automated transactions and digital identity. This could point to even more integration of AI and blockchain in financial services worldwide, including in Europe.

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