Recently at the Consensus Miami venue, a judgment that was originally circulating only within the crypto circle was expressed nearly identically by two giants: Google Cloud Web3 Strategy Head Richard Widmann and a senior executive from PayPal's crypto business stated on stage that future business activities driven by AI Agents—ranging from automated procurement and automatic settlement to automatic payments—will operate on crypto or on-chain payment tracks. The reasoning is not complicated: as pure software entities, AI Agents cannot open and use traditional bank accounts like humans or companies can through KYC, but they must have programmable, verifiable, and automatically executable value accounts to complete business cycles; and on-chain addresses are inherently such "wallets" that do not rely on the banking account system. Over the past few years, PayPal has launched the fiat-pegged on-chain payment tool PYUSD and continued to bet on crypto payments, and Google Cloud has been providing node and infrastructure services for various Web3 projects. This time at Consensus Miami, the two companies connected these disparate layouts into a clear narrative: on-chain settlement tokens pegged to fiat and on-chain payment tracks will become the underlying electricity, water, and coal of the AI Agent economy and the next generation of internet business. After the meeting, multiple Chinese media outlets, including PANews, Odaily Planet Daily, and Deep Tide TechFlow, cited CoinDesk reports to amplify this perspective, and the real conflict was brought to the fore—outside the traditional financial system designed around human accounts, who will provide the billions of AI Agents with truly usable payment and settlement capabilities.

The Banking Account Dilemma of AI Agents

At the Consensus Miami venue, when Google Cloud Web3 Strategy Head Richard Widmann and the PayPal crypto business executive talked about "who will open accounts for AI Agents," the premise was already implicitly accepted: traditional banks will not open doors for a piece of code. From the outset, bank accounts were designed to serve identifiable humans and enterprises, with the account opening process revolving around the identification, address information, and risk assessment of natural persons or legal entities. Every account must have a subject that can be regulated and held accountable, whereas AI Agents are merely software logic running on servers and have no place in the existing framework.

This is not simply a matter of "not having thought through the process" but rather an exclusion of AI from the very foundation of account models and compliance responsibilities. Traditional financial KYC and risk control clauses require banks to know clearly "who the customer is" and to assume joint liability for the customer’s transactional behavior. However, AI Agents are neither natural persons nor registered companies; they can only be "indirectly represented" by certain developers or institutions and cannot appear in any forms or system fields themselves. Therefore, when we envision AI Agents undertaking automated procurement, automatic settlement, and automatic payments, the first wall they hit is not computational power, nor algorithms, but the simple fact that they cannot even obtain the most basic bank accounts—this "account opening threshold" becomes the primary obstacle to the commercialization of AI, forcing the entire industry to seek a value account system that does not rely on human identity.

Why On-Chain Payments Suit AI Business

When AI Agents are blocked outside bank doors, the only "doorknob" they can grasp is the on-chain address. In the same discussion at Consensus Miami, Google Cloud's Richard Widmann and PayPal's crypto business executive stated directly: on-chain accounts do not require the entity to be a natural person nor care whether this piece of code can undergo KYC; as long as a string of addresses is generated, it can receive, hold, and send tokens without the prerequisite of a traditional bank account. For a piece of software, this is the inherently suited form of a "native account"—not reliant on any human identity yet capable of directly participating in value circulation.

More critically, programmability and composability upgrade such accounts from "able to receive money" to "able to conduct business." On-chain payment instructions can be written into smart contracts, transforming into automated logic for conditional settlements, profit-sharing allocations, and streaming payments. AI Agents can directly specify in code "payment upon task completion" and "automatic multi-party settlements" without needing manual reconciliation or offline signatures; different protocols can naturally compose, with one responsible for quoting, another for custody, and another for clearing. As long as Agents call APIs, they can complete a full business cycle. Thus, multiple Chinese media outlets citing CoinDesk reports place fiat-pegged tokens and on-chain payments as core infrastructure for the "next generation of the internet and AI Agent economy," and at the consensus conference, crypto payment and on-chain infrastructure were repeatedly described as realistic feasible solutions for AI Agent business settlements—whoever first paves large-scale, programmable on-chain payment tracks for these Agents will hold the underlying switch for the next round of automated commercial experimentation.

PayPal and Google Betting on On-Chain Settlements

On the stage at Consensus Miami, PayPal was not suddenly discussing on-chain settlements. Over the past few years, this traditional payment giant has already stepped into the crypto track, publicly launching the fiat-pegged PYUSD and continuously building products and business collaborations for everyday payments around it, treating "regulatable on-chain dollars" as a pivot for the next phase of business expansion. For PayPal, AI Agents are not a new type of customer appearing from nowhere but a "new source of traffic" that can be directly connected to its existing crypto payment layout: when an Agent needs to complete automated procurement and settlements programmatically, native pricing tools like PYUSD, which operate on-chain, are naturally easier to be integrated into code logic than traditional bank card systems.

Alongside this, there is another route from Google Cloud. Over the past few years, Google Cloud has been providing services from the ground up in the Web3 field, offering node hosting, infrastructure, and other cloud services, embedding itself within the operating environment of public chains and decentralized applications. Now, Richard Widmann, in charge of Web3 strategy, stands on the Consensus Miami stage, alongside the crypto business executive from PayPal, openly stating that AI Agent business activities will operate on crypto or on-chain payment tracks in the future and clarifying the reason—that software Agents cannot open bank accounts through KYC like natural persons but can directly use on-chain addresses to send and receive tokens and complete automatic settlements. When a company that masters global payment gateways and another that controls cloud computing power and Web3 infrastructure give the same direction at such a conference seen as an industry bellwether, it conveys not just a comment on trends but also releases to the outside: the next step in their product and infrastructure evolution will automatically assume that AI Agents view on-chain as their main venue for settlements.

From Humans to Machines: New Requirements for AI Business Payments

Over the past twenty years, online payments have fundamentally been a "human orders, human payments" link: users confirm on a page, merchants initiate debit instructions, and banks or payment institutions complete settlements during working hours, with each transaction often corresponding to a specific manual operation. In such a paradigm, payment systems are naturally designed around "business hours," "manual review," and "identifiable human or company accounts," with risk control, compliance, and settlement rhythms assuming that a sober natural person on the other side of the screen makes decisions at limited frequencies.

The discussion at Consensus Miami shifts the focus to another end—business activities driven autonomously by AI: automated procurement, automatic settlement, automatic payments. The subjects here are no longer "people who occasionally press the payment button," but a group of Agents operating around the clock, needing to routinely place orders, reconcile, and settle with each other in high frequency and small amounts, much of which is purely machine-to-machine trading. For such entities, payments are no longer events that are activated repeatedly but rather a continual foundational action: Agents must initiate and receive flows of funds at any time without human intervention. In traditional systems limited by manual operations and bank business hours, such demands are either delayed or stuck in manual review stages; only payment tracks sufficiently automated, programmable, and able to operate 24/7 can undertake this new commercial assembly line from "human to machine."

Next Station: Coexistence of AI and Crypto Payments

As the lights gradually dim at the Consensus Miami venue, a relatively clear outline has emerged: AI Agents are turned away by the traditional bank account framework, while on-chain addresses naturally serve as their "value accounts"; the two are not mutually exclusive in the same business scenario but rather fit together as a complete puzzle. The reason Richard Widmann and the PayPal crypto business executive dared to say on stage that "future AI business will operate on crypto payment tracks" is, on one hand, due to Google Cloud's in-depth Web3 infrastructure and PayPal's launch of PYUSD and other business layouts in recent years, and on the other hand, because they understand this remains a medium- to long-term directional consensus: the on-site speeches were deliberately positioned as trend judgments and foundational facility prospects, with no timetable, no mandatory policies, and no official commitments regarding immediate landings or certainty of gains. For the market, this is not a short-term price signal that can be traded but a hypothesis of a path that needs years of validation—whether the real commercial scale of AI Agents can grow, how regulation will treat on-chain settlements initiated autonomously by software, and whether enterprises and users are willing to entrust key payment flows to a wholly new tech stack will determine whether this new on-chain payment path is merely a good story from the conference or a foundation capable of supporting the next round of growth.

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