The product issues tokenized Visa credentials to AI agents programmatically, in under 60 seconds, with hard spending limits enforced at the payment network level rather than in software. At launch, AgentCard is compatible with several widely used coding and task-execution agents, including Claude Code, Cursor, Devin, and OpenClaw.

The company says agents can use the cards to pay for AI inference and API usage, place orders on DoorDash, Uber, and Amazon, execute trades on Polymarket, the prediction market platform, and handle marketing tasks and procurement workflows.

Solana, Base, and Polymarket each publicly backed the product at launch.

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Visa Credentials First, Crypto Rails Later

AgentCard defaults to Visa's tokenized credential infrastructure, which Visa announced eight days earlier at its annual Payments Forum under the name Visa Intelligent Commerce. That system allows payment tokens to be scoped to a specific agent, merchant, or transaction type, adding a layer of control that standard card credentials do not offer. Visa's broader push into agentic commerce also includes a verified agent registry, an AI fraud detection model trained on billions of transactions, an Agent Score developed with New Generation that evaluates merchant readiness for agentic commerce, and a partnership with OpenAI to let ChatGPT initiate purchases through Visa tokens.

Alchemy has stated it plans to extend AgentCard to crypto-native payment rails over time, including on-chain wallet funding and support for protocols like x402, a standard that embeds cryptocurrency payments directly into the HTTP web protocol using the long-dormant "402 Payment Required" status code. Since its launch in May 2025, x402 has processed more than 100 million payments. Coinbase transferred governance of the protocol to the x402 Foundation under the Linux Foundation in April 2026, with founding members that include Google, Stripe, AWS, Visa, and Microsoft.

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AgentPay as the Foundation

AgentCard sits on top of AgentPay, an interoperability layer Alchemy launched in April 2026 to address fragmentation across competing AI payment systems. Each major payments player, including Coinbase, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and Circle, currently operates its own separate protocol. Merchants building for AI agents must build multiple integrations independently.

"A merchant registers their existing API with us, we give them a new endpoint, and any agent on any supported protocol can pay them through it," Alchemy CTO Guillaume Poncin said at the time of AgentPay's launch. He called the fragmentation "unsustainable."

AgentPay routes payment instructions between protocols without taking custody of funds. AgentCard extends that infrastructure to the individual agent and developer use case, giving each agent a spendable credential.

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Security and Spending Controls

Alchemy says card credentials, including card numbers and CVV codes, are encrypted at rest using AES-256-GCM. Authentication runs over HTTPS-only session tokens. The company states it does not share or sell transaction data to third parties. Cards can be frozen or revoked instantly. The spending limits, a key selling point, are enforced by the payment network itself rather than by application-layer code, which makes them harder to circumvent.

By acting as a routing intermediary across protocols, however, Alchemy accumulates visibility into AI agent payment patterns at scale. The company's "no third-party data sharing" statement addresses one dimension of data risk, but it does not address Alchemy's own first-party accumulation of cross-protocol transaction intelligence, a concentration risk that grows as the platform scales.

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What This Means Outside the United States

AgentCard is a US-centric product at launch, and the Visa Intelligent Commerce token layer that underpins it is not yet confirmed to be live in most markets outside the US. That limits near-term accessibility for users in South Asia and Africa, two regions where agentic payment infrastructure has the most structural potential.

India ranks first globally in crypto adoption and saw an estimated $89 billion in stablecoin transaction volume from Indian addresses in 2024. The country's enormous developer population, many of whom use AI coding tools that AgentCard supports, represents a practical early use case for autonomous compute payments. However, India's central bank continues to restrict private stablecoins while simultaneously advancing a digital rupee CBDC, a substitution strategy that represents a more nuanced regulatory dynamic than simple restriction. The crypto-native layer of AgentCard's roadmap would face significant regulatory headwinds in India for now.

Pakistan's situation is different. The country launched a regulatory sandbox for stablecoin remittance providers in late 2025, approving three providers for pilots, and the UAE-to-Pakistan remittance corridor, the largest in the Middle East, moves roughly $24 billion per year. An AI agent autonomously routing transfers through optimized stablecoin rails could substantially reduce the 6 to 8 percent fees typical of traditional wire transfers.

In Africa, the IMF has explicitly identified agentic payment systems as a structural opportunity for financial inclusion, particularly in sub-Saharan cross-border remittances where corridor costs often run 7 to 10 percent. Africa receives more than $100 billion in annual remittances, which puts the scale of those costs in sharp relief. South Africa, which issued 300 crypto asset service provider licenses by the end of 2025 and counts major banks including Absa among institutions already deploying agentic AI for autonomous operations, is the most likely entry point on the continent. Nigeria, which lifted its crypto ban in 2023, and Kenya, which has a large and active crypto community despite ongoing regulatory grey zones, are also markets with high remittance inflows and meaningful near-term potential.

The IMF has also called for new "know-your-agent" regulatory frameworks before agentic payments scale in these markets, a standard that does not yet exist anywhere.

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The Road Ahead

The market for AI agents is projected to grow from $7.84 billion in 2025 to roughly $52 billion by 2030.

Alchemy is competing in a field that now includes Mastercard Agent Pay, Stripe's Shared Payment Tokens, Circle's USDC-native agent stack, AWS AgentCore Payments (built with Coinbase), which processes USDC on Base and Solana, and Crossmint, which currently offers the broadest crypto coverage among direct competitors, spanning more than 150 countries and 50 chains.

No jurisdiction has yet established clear liability rules for AI-initiated transactions that result in fraud or disputes, a legal gap that analysts at Fenwick and West flagged earlier this year as a foundational risk for the entire category. The IMF has raised a separate and more fundamental technical concern: because AI agents rely on probabilistic reasoning, they may produce inconsistent outcomes from identical inputs, creating systemic risk for payment authorization systems that depend on deterministic execution. The IMF recommends that AI operate only in the intent and orchestration layer, with strict rule-based controls at authorization and settlement.

AgentCard's crypto-native rails remain on the roadmap for now. How quickly Alchemy delivers them, and whether regulators in key emerging markets move in parallel, will determine whether the product develops into global infrastructure or stays a US developer tool.