Agentic Commerce and the Economics of Machine-to-Machine Payments
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: We define agentic commerce as the delegation of commercial decisions and payments to artificial intelligence (AI) and provide statistics on prices and services using data from Coinbase’s x402 Protocol and Tempo & Stripe’s Machine Payments Protocol. Despite more than 234 million recorded transactions, activity across these protocols consists largely of pay-per-use micropayments for digital resources, while observed x402 usage is concentrated among a small number of services, many of which report few paying accounts. Agentic commerce can reduce search and transaction costs, but it also creates governance and accountability problems when AI agents make persistent errors, interact strategically, or are manipulated, potentially generating negative distributional and welfare effects. This review also discusses regulatory approaches and identifies priorities for AI governance and future research.
Source: The Journal of FinTech
Author: Valerie Laturnus
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7214994842