Google defends crypto rails over bank accounts

Google and PayPal told Consensus Miami AI agents will run on crypto rails as bank accounts remain inaccessible.

Senior figures from Google Cloud and PayPal Consensus Miami on May 10 that the next wave of internet commerce will run on crypto rails because AI agents cannot use traditional financial accounts. Richard Widmann, global head of Web3 strategy at Google Cloud, said the current internet experience does not extend to autonomous agents.

“An agent cannot get a bank account. It’s not hard, it just is impossible,” Widmann said, citing technological and regulatory barriers. Crypto, by contrast, is “a fantastic machine-readable interface for payments,” he added.

What Google and PayPal are building

To address the gap, Google has launched the Agentic Payments Protocol, or AP2, an open protocol donated to the FIDO Foundation with more than 120 partners including PayPal. Widmann compared the move to the x402 internet-native payment standard given to the Linux Foundation.

May Zabaneh, senior vice president and general manager of crypto at PayPal, said the company treats agents as the next commerce channel after its evolution from offline to online to mobile payments. PYUSD, PayPal’s stablecoin, is “a very natural programmable layer for payments,” she said.

A recent PayPal survey found 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,” Zabaneh said.

The broader shift in AI commerce

McKinsey estimates AI agents could mediate up to $5 trillion in global consumer commerce by 2030. The question facing the industry is no longer whether agents will handle payments, but which rails they will run on and who controls the standards.

Consensus Miami 2026 was the first major crypto conference to dedicate an entire programming track to agentic commerce. On liability, Zabaneh said the question of who is responsible when an AI agent makes a disputed purchase remains unresolved, calling it one of the key open questions the sector must answer.

MoonPay has also moved into this space with non-custodial wallets built specifically for AI agents, adding competitive pressure on the emerging agentic payments infrastructure.