Google and PayPal executives believe that encrypted payments will become the underlying infrastructure of future commerce.

According to Mars Finance, executives from PayPal and Google Cloud stated that future AI Agent-driven business activities will operate on a crypto payment track because AI Agents cannot use traditional bank accounts like humans. Richard Widmann, head of Google Cloud Web3 strategy, stated that AI Agents cannot directly open bank accounts from both a technical and regulatory perspective, while cryptocurrencies provide an "excellent machine-readable payment interface." He revealed that Google has launched the open Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2) and donated it to the FIDO Foundation, with over 120 partners, including PayPal, already participating. May Zabaneh, Senior Vice President of Crypto at PayPal, stated that the company sees AI Agents as the next-generation business gateway after offline, online, and mobile payments. She pointed out that PYUSD, as PayPal's stablecoin, provides a natural programmable payment layer for AI-native payments and global transactions. PayPal's research shows that 95% of merchant websites currently experience AI Agent traffic, but only about 20% of merchants have machine-readable product catalogs. Zabaneh believes that merchants need to adapt to the AI Agent era as soon as possible, otherwise they will miss the next round of business infrastructure upgrades. In addition, the two sides discussed the security and liability issues of AI Agents. Widmann stated that multi-party custody will become an important solution for Agent fund management; AI Agents should not have complete control over private keys, but only hold partial key fragments to reduce financial risk.