Google and PayPal Tell Consensus Miami That AI Agents Will Transact on Crypto Rails

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Senior executives from Google Cloud and PayPal said Thursday that AI agents cannot access traditional financial accounts, and argued that crypto infrastructure is best positioned to serve as the payments layer for autonomous commerce. They outlined the protocols and custody architectures they are building to support that shift.

Google Cloud and PayPal Executives Outline Barriers Blocking Agents from Traditional Finance

Speaking at CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference, Richard Widmann, global head of Web3 strategy at Google Cloud, said the current internet user experience does not extend to autonomous agents: 

“An agent cannot get a bank account. It’s not hard, it just is impossible. There are technological and regulatory barriers. Crypto is a fantastic machine readable interface for payments.” 

May Zabaneh, senior vice president and general manager of crypto at PayPal, said her company views AI agents as the next channel in a line of commerce shifts, from offline to online to mobile. PayPal’s stablecoin, PYUSD, is “a very natural programmable layer for payments,” she said, particularly given trends toward globalization, AI-native experiences, and tokenized assets.

Google Donates Agentic Payments Protocol to FIDO Foundation with 120 Partners

To address the gap between agent capabilities and existing payment infrastructure, Google has launched the Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2), an open protocol donated to the FIDO Foundation, Widmann said. 

The protocol has more than 120 partners, including PayPal. Widmann compared the move to the x402 internet-native payment standard, which was contributed to the Linux Foundation. “Open dialogues and open standards are really the foundation you need to build on,” he said.

PayPal Survey Finds Only 20% of Merchants Have Machine-Readable Catalogs

Zabaneh cited a recent PayPal survey finding that 95% of merchants now see AI agent traffic on their sites, but only 20% have machine-readable catalogs. “Merchants need to be ready for this next era,” she said, drawing a parallel to the earlier shift from physical to online retail, when merchants had to digitize their product listings to remain accessible. 

She said merchants now face a similar requirement: exposing their inventory in formats that agents can read and act on. On the question of liability when an agent executes a flawed purchase, Zabaneh said the issue is “definitely something that we have to think through as an industry.”

Google Extends Cloud KMS to Crypto Custody as Widmann Raises Onboarding Concern

Widmann said multi-party custody is becoming a central design consideration for agent systems. Google has extended its Cloud Key Management Service to cryptocurrency custody, and Widmann argued that agents should hold only one of two or three key shards rather than a complete private key. “It cannot simply unilaterally move funds or take action,” he said. 

Asked what keeps them up at night, Widmann identified the open question of “how do you onboard agents into all of the existing capital markets and infrastructure plumbing that powers payments and trading today.” Zabaneh said trust is her primary professional concern, while adding that on a personal level she “can’t wait for agentic to help make my life easier.”