Decrypt explores how AI agents transitioning from advisory to transactional roles are creating demand for new payment infrastructure.
AI & Agents ·
AI agents today can recommend actions—book flights, draft emails, find nearby services—but most cannot complete transactions independently. The gap between advisory and transactional capability represents a missing piece of the emerging "agentic economy," where agents would autonomously settle payments, access data, and execute trades on behalf of users. Current AI systems lack the real-time settlement infrastructure, compliance layers, and trust mechanisms needed to move money safely at machine speed.
XDC Network's XDC AI product addresses this by pairing the x402 open payment standard with "gasless" USDC settlement, allowing agents to pay per API request without requiring accounts or human approval. The x402 standard, introduced by Coinbase in 2025, repurposes an HTTP status code unused since the 1990s to enable servers to charge for data or API calls in a single transaction. XDC Network, which launched in 2019 and focuses on trade finance and tokenized assets, positions XDC AI as shared infrastructure for developers—letting businesses like coffee shops or travel platforms build agent-driven applications on a common marketplace rather than building individual payment rails.
Whether this infrastructure will scale to support widespread agent transactions remains unclear, as does adoption by the broader AI industry beyond early demonstrations.