When an agent buys something, the money has to move through a protocol that says who the agent is, what it is allowed to spend, and how the merchant gets paid without holding raw credentials. A dozen of these are being defined at once, some open, some run by a single company, some by the networks. This is the running map of them: what each one is, who owns it, and where it stands. Every row is dated and traced to a source. The x402 protocol has its own deeper tracker, linked from its row.

10 entries · 5 live · 4 spec-published · 1 announced

Open protocols

Agentic Mobile Protocol (AMP)2026-04-28live
Ant International
An open-sourced agentic payment framework for wallets, super apps, and wearables that embeds a Know-Your-Agent digital-identity framework, with a 2026 Phase I rollout across ten Alipay+ wallets and seven acquirers.
Source
Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)2026-01-11spec-published
Google, with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, Walmart and others
An open-source agentic commerce standard whose Identity Linking capability lets a shopper connect retailer accounts via OAuth so agents transact with the user’s authenticated merchant identity and loyalty benefits.
Source
Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)2025-09-29live
OpenAI and Stripe
The open standard behind Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, in which the agent passes a Shared Payment Token to the merchant so the order can be identified and accepted without the merchant receiving raw card credentials.
Source
Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)2025-09-16spec-published
Google, with 60+ payments and technology partners
An open protocol for agent-led payments in which each purchase is a set of cryptographically signed, tamper-evident Mandates (Intent, Cart, Payment) built on verifiable credentials.
Source
x4022025-05-01live
Coinbase and Cloudflare (x402 Foundation, Linux Foundation)
The HTTP 402-based protocol that lets an agent pay per request programmatically, with no human and no checkout page, settling over stablecoin rails. Tracked in depth in the Major Matters x402 Adoption Tracker at /x402.
Source

Network programs

Know-Your-Agent (KYA) Interoperability Framework2026-09-09announced
Ant International, Mastercard and Visa
A collaboration on a Know-Your-Agent interoperability framework to streamline AI agent onboarding and identification across card networks, wallet ecosystems, agent platforms and marketplaces, each retaining its own verification.
Source
Verifiable Intent2026-03-05spec-published
Mastercard and Google
An open, standards-based framework (v0.1 draft, February 2026, with a Python reference implementation) that links a consumer’s identity, their instructions to an agent, and the transaction outcome into a tamper-resistant record.
Source
Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP)2025-10-14spec-published
Visa, co-developed with Cloudflare
A framework enabling AI agents to cryptographically identify themselves to merchants during agentic commerce transactions, with partners including Adyen, Ant International, Checkout.com, Coinbase, Fiserv, Microsoft, Shopify and Stripe.
Source
Agent Pay2025-04-29live
Mastercard
An agentic payments program that registers and verifies AI agents and uses Agentic Tokens (an extension of tokenization) to bind a card credential to a specific agent, merchant scope, and consent.
Source

Standards

Web Bot Auth2025-05-15live
Cloudflare (proposed), now under IETF standardization
A mechanism using HTTP Message Signatures and well-known key directories so bots and AI agents cryptographically identify themselves to origins instead of relying on IP addresses or user-agent strings; now being standardized by the IETF.
Source

Every entry is a factual record traced to its source, not an endorsement. Machine-readable: /trackers/agent-payment-protocols/feed. Missing something or spot an error? Reply to any edition. See also all trackers.