Mastercard Incorporated (MA)

Core Technology

@Mastercard is playing the same game as Visa. It is a company that also aims to maintain its card network position even in the era of Agents. Mastercard's chosen strategy is to open its existing payment network, covering over 210 countries, to Agents while building architecture that enables merchants to easily integrate into its system.

In April 2025, Mastercard launched Mastercard Agent Pay, followed by developer tools in September and the Agent Pay Acceptance Framework in October, steadily building its Agent payment system.

The commonality among these components is that Mastercard does not attempt to dominate the market with its own protocol. Its strategy is to ensure that regardless of which direction the market moves, Mastercard can engage during payment and authentication moments. This is the same "payment layer neutrality" strategy as Visa's, but Mastercard focuses on merchant acceptance.

Mastercard's true battleground is to enable merchants to accept Agent payments without any operation. Typically, when merchants adopt a new payment method, they must embed code into their websites. Mastercard eliminates this burden.

By collaborating with Cloudflare, Mastercard has built a structure in front of merchant websites that can instantly differentiate “trusted Agent traffic from malicious bots,” only allowing trusted Agents to pass through to the merchant. Merchants can accept Agent transactions without touching a single line of code.

Another path is left for merchants wishing for deep integration. Merchants that wish to directly converse with Agents can connect through major Agent protocols such as MCP, A2A, and ACP. Ultimately, merchants have two choices: do nothing and accept default traffic; or connect protocols and build custom experiences. Either way, transactions will flow through Mastercard.

Core Business

Mastercard’s revenue structure is simple. Fees are incurred each time a payment goes through the Mastercard network. In the 2025 fiscal year, revenue is projected at approximately 32.8 billion USD, with transaction volume hitting 175.5 billion transactions. Whether the payment is made by an Agent or a human, the same fees apply as long as the transaction goes through the Mastercard network.

The problem is that Agent payments could completely bypass the card network. If direct settlement occurs on-chain via stablecoins, Mastercard loses its position. Agent Pay is specifically designed as a strategy to fill this gap.

Mastercard's chosen path is to lower the threshold for merchants. Adopting a new payment method typically requires merchants to embed new code into their systems. Mastercard eliminates this burden. By collaborating with Cloudflare, Mastercard has built a layer in front of merchant websites that automatically filters trusted Agent traffic.

The more merchants that connect to the network, the more transactions are conducted through Mastercard.

The revenue path remains unchanged. Each time an Agent completes a payment via the Mastercard network, fees will be incurred. The structure is identical to when a card is swiped. The difference is that Agent payments are faster and more frequent than human payments. As transaction volume grows, the speed at which fees accumulate will also increase.

For Mastercard, the growth of Agent transactions is a natural extension of fee revenue. This is not about opening up a new business, but about ushering existing structures into the Agent era.

Outlook

Mastercard's outlook can be summarized in one sentence: like Visa, it does not pick a winner in the protocol race but aims to dominate how merchants accept Agents.

The core of this strategy is enabling merchants to accept Agent payments without touching a line of code. By working with Cloudflare, Mastercard effectively removes barriers to entry for merchants.

Visa is also moving in this direction, but Visa is currently dealing with stablecoin variables at the same time. With the acquisition of Bridge and the involvement of Tempo validators, the frontline has expanded. In contrast, Mastercard can still focus all its energy on the merchant acceptance layer. Defending a single front is an advantage at present.

The question is how long this concentration can be maintained. If payments between Agents begin to settle directly on-chain with stablecoins, transaction volume through existing payment networks may decline. Visa has already begun to address this risk; Mastercard has not yet publicly acted.

Stripe, Inc.

Core Technology

@stripe is the company that has become the internet commercial payment standard over the past 15 years by developing developer-friendly APIs. To maintain this position in the Agent era, Stripe's strategy is to lay new Agent-ready payment tracks directly on top of existing infrastructure.

To this end, in September 2025, Stripe published ACP together with OpenAI as an open standard and announced its own payment primitive SPT (Shared Payment Token) in the same year.

Stripe's Agent payment stack consists of four components.

The commonality among the four components is that only ACP is an open standard; the others are proprietary technologies by Stripe. If ACP is the common language about "how Agents interact with merchants," then SPT is Stripe's proprietary payment token responsible for how money flows in that interaction.

The flow of SPT is as follows:

• The user says in ChatGPT, "Buy this."
• Stripe issues a one-time payment token (SPT).
• The Agent passes that token to the merchant.
• The merchant verifies the token and completes the payment.

The card number is never directly given to the Agent. Stripe issues a one-time token (SPT), which can only be used for this transaction, allowing the Agent to only pass that token to the merchant, thereby reducing the risk of card data theft. Moreover, any merchant already using Stripe needs only a single line of code to enable SPT payments.

In other words, this is the fastest path for merchants already integrated with Stripe, but merchants using other PSPs need separate integration.

Core Business

Stripe differentiates itself by designing SPT as the hub for Agent payments to enter the Stripe ecosystem rather than just a simple payment token. Once a merchant adopts SPT to accept Agent payments, adjacent Stripe products will follow as packages. Open one door, and four doors connect together.

Here's how it works: once a merchant adopts SPT to accept Agent payments, Stripe's adjacent services will follow as a bundled package.

Payment fees: Each Agent transaction through SPT carries the same fee structure as before. Agent payments are much faster and far more frequent. As more transactions occur, the speed at which fees are charged per transaction will accelerate. The payment method has changed; the fee structure has not.

Visa and Mastercard charge a fee each time a payment goes through their networks and then move on. Stripe uses payments as an entry point, binding merchants to its complete financial services stack.

From a merchant’s perspective, connecting a single Agent payment ultimately bonds the merchant to the entire Stripe ecosystem.

Outlook

Stripe's outlook can be summarized in one sentence: an all-encompassing strategy that occupies every layer of Agent payments.

Stripe has positioned itself at every layer of Agent payments: protocol layer (ACP), payment token layer (SPT), and stablecoin (@tempo). While Visa and Mastercard view stablecoins as a defensive challenge, Stripe has locked in the bypassing of cards as an offensive asset.

But the core question is this: can Stripe transcend the card network?

Stripe's current revenue structure is still built on top of Visa and Mastercard networks. SPT, payment fees, and merchant bundling all depend on the card networks. Only when stablecoins truly replace card networks will the structure change, but no one knows when that moment will arrive.

Admittedly, Stripe is currently double betting. However, if Visa and Mastercard operate the highways, Stripe is the most successful logistics company on those highways. Being the top logistics company is different from owning the highways themselves.

First, there’s the relationship with OpenAI. While ACP is a jointly developed protocol, real-time payment through ChatGPT is essentially Stripe's monopoly. If OpenAI builds its own payment track or allies with another PSP after the traffic accumulates to a sizable scale, Stripe could lose its largest AI channel. This relationship is currently necessary for both parties, but no alliance is permanent.

Second, there’s the open nature of ACP. Because ACP is an open standard, competitive PSPs like Adyen and Worldpay can also produce compatible tokens. Today, Stripe's market share naturally leads merchants to choose SPT; once competitors launch equivalent tokens, the premium enjoyed by the protocol proposer will quickly dilute.

Pay-per-call

The Agentic Commerce discussed above is a model where humans decide payment, whereas Pay-per-call is a market where Agents themselves act as the payers. As long as there are funds in the account, the Agents will settle autonomously. This structure is activated when an Agent calls another Agent's API, data, or computations.

For example, an Agent is asked to write a market analysis report.

• The user requests the Agent to write a market analysis report.
• The Agent queries the OpenAI API and gets a response.
• To verify data, it requests information from Dune and Nansen APIs.
• The completed report is sent to another Agent for review.

A report involves dozens of payments. However, unlike Agentic Commerce, the amounts can be as low as fractions of a cent. In traditional payment systems, such structures lead to losses on each transaction due to fees. This is why Pay-per-call relies on stablecoins, which have extremely low fees.

Currently, there are three infrastructure standards for Pay-per-call:

• Protocol Layer: How Agents express payment intent through messages.
• Settlement Layer: On which chain and with which asset the payment is settled.
• Trust Layer: Who verifies who pays what and with what authority.

Coinbase Global, Inc. (COIN)

Core Technology

@coinbase is the company building x402, a standard that allows Agents to make payments without going through card networks.

In May 2025, Coinbase released the x402 protocol, activating the previously dormant HTTP 402 (Payment Required) status code. In the same year, Coinbase and Cloudflare jointly established the x402 Foundation to extend x402 into a universal payment layer.

x402 is an open payment protocol consisting of five elements.

x402 works simply: when an Agent calls an API, the server returns an HTTP 402 response containing pricing, receiving address, asset, and network information. The Agent signs the payment with its own wallet, includes it in the header, and makes a re-request. The server verifies and settles the payment through the Facilitator, which broadcasts it on-chain.

Flow

• The Agent requests a resource from the server.
• The server returns an HTTP 402 with payment terms.
• The Agent signs the payment authorization with its own wallet and re-requests, carrying the signature in the X-PAYMENT header.
• The server passes the payload to the Facilitator (the validation and settlement service), which broadcasts on-chain.
• After settlement is confirmed, the server returns a 200 response and provides the resource.

The most fundamental difference between x402 and existing payment systems is that the payment itself serves as the authentication. Agents can autonomously discover, pay, and use new APIs without human intervention.

The V2 update expands x402 from a one-time call payment protocol to a universal layer that supports multiple types of authentication, sessions, and chains.

The most significant change is wallet-based sessions. V1 required a payment for each call; V2 introduces session-based payments (Sign-In-With-X), allowing for repeated use within a set time after a single payment. This change enables workloads (like LLM calls and multi-call Agents) that previously couldn't settle on-call due to being too slow or expensive to operate within x402.

Core Business

Coinbase's current revenue comes from exchange fees. In 2025, annual revenue is projected at around 7.2 billion USD, most of which is derived from cryptocurrency trading fees. x402 is currently unrelated to this revenue structure. But this is precisely why Coinbase has open-sourced x402: to release standards for free and then earn revenue based on the infrastructure operating that standard.

This strategy is similar to Google's: Open-source Android and then capture revenue through Play Store and Google Pay.

The market targeted by x402 is fundamentally different from that of Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe. Card payments charge 0.30 USD + 2.9%. However, micropayments like 0.01 USD API calls, 0.005 USD image classifications, or 0.50 USD for a minute of GPU time cannot exist on card networks.

The market opened by x402 lies in Agent payments to other Agents, or paying API providers, where the unit and frequency are factors that humans cannot trigger with a payment button.

When this distant future market opens, two revenue streams will flow to Coinbase.

Base transaction fees: the default settlement layer for x402 is Coinbase's Layer 2 chain Base. Every x402 payment generates transactions on Base, and Coinbase captures the sorting fee revenue. As x402 transaction volume increases, the transaction fees and locked assets on Base will also grow. The standard is released for free, but the chain operating that standard is run by Coinbase.

CDP infrastructure fees: each x402 payment requires a facilitator to verify "whether the payment is real" and actually move funds. The default facilitator is operated by Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP). Once developers start using x402, they will naturally pull in adjacent CDP tools: wallet creation, gas sponsorship, and data analytics.

However, since x402 V2, third-party facilitators can also participate. Thus, the locking power of facilitators is weaker than initially expected. Coinbase's true play lies elsewhere. The most affordable and fastest running x402 blockchain is Base, built by Coinbase, and its official white paper clearly states that x402 performs best on Base.

In simple terms: Stripe binds the payment moment to its own system. In contrast, Coinbase builds the highway for payments and lets travelers on that road naturally pull into Coinbase's rest area (CDP tools).

Outlook

Coinbase's outlook can be summarized in one sentence: not a game of defeating competitors, but a game of how quickly a yet-to-exist market will open.

This framework is important because x402 does not compete in the same domain as card networks. Credit cards charge a fee of 0.30 USD + 2.9%. Micropayments like 0.01 USD API calls, 0.005 USD image classifications, or 0.50 USD for a minute of GPU time simply can't exist on card networks.

Even if Visa and Mastercard accept Agent payments, that remains within the domain of Agents executing the buying behavior previously conducted by humans. The market that x402 opens lies at the next level: payments Agents make to other Agents or to payment service providers, in units and frequencies that humans can't press the payment button on.

The issue is that the trading market between Agents is still very small. For Agents to autonomously procure external resources from unspecified providers as part of their everyday workflows, these transactions must occur at a rate of dozens per second, with each transaction valued under 0.001 USD.

Only when the speed and unit price emerge that the existing subscription structure cannot handle does the proposition of "Pay-per-call being better than credit cards" hold true.

Ultimately, the expansion of this market follows a sequence. First, Agentic Commerce must grow; only through this process can trust and autonomy of Agents build up, validating the demand for the Pay-per-call market.

The winners of Agentic Commerce are already in competition. The winner of Pay-per-call will be determined at the moment the market opens.