Key Takeaways
- Alchemy launched Agentcard with Visa, enabling artificial intelligence (AI) agents to make purchases.
- Agentcard adds spend limits, tokenized payments, and crypto support for AI commerce.
- Visa, Metamask, and Mastercard are expanding agent finance as adoption grows into 2026.
AI Agents Move Beyond Chat Into Real-World Spending
Alchemy is moving into agentic commerce with the launch of Agentcard, a payments and identity product that lets AI agents make online purchases on behalf of consumers and businesses.
The product integrates with Visa Intelligent Commerce, Visa’s framework for secure AI-driven commerce. Through the integration, agents can transact using Visa-issued tokens while preserving card rewards, credit lines, and existing card benefits.
Agentcard is designed to work with AI agents built on models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic. In practice, that means an agent could book travel, order groceries or renew a subscription without the user going through a checkout flow manually.
Alchemy said developers can set up Agentcard in under a minute through a single API. The system provisions a Visa payment token, a dedicated email address, a phone number, and a crypto wallet for the agent.
Identity and Payments for Autonomous Agents
Nikil Viswanathan, Alchemy’s co-founder and CEO, said AI agents represent the next major class of digital economic actors. He commented:
The internet created online businesses. Mobile created the app economy. AI agents are next, and they need to be able to access the global economy.
Each agent receives an email address at agentcard.email and a new phone number. Those credentials allow agents to sign up for services, receive verification messages, and operate more like human users across digital platforms.
The payment layer includes built-in controls. Users can set merchant category restrictions, per-transaction limits, and custom budgets when the agent is created or later in real time.
By default, transactions use tokenized card payments. Agentcard also supports emerging agent payment protocols, including crypto, where merchants accept it.
Alchemy said the routing layer is designed to choose the best payment rail for each transaction. Where agent-native payment protocols are not yet available, the system can fall back to single-use tokens. As merchant and network adoption improve, the payment path can upgrade automatically without developer reconfiguration.
Visa, Mastercard and MetaMask Push Into Agentic Finance
Tanner Riche, Visa’s vice president of growth products and partnerships, said agents need trusted identity and reliable ways to transact as they take on a larger role in commerce.
Our Visa Intelligent Commerce infrastructure is designed to support agentic commerce in a manner that is secure, reliable, and ready to scale.
The launch comes as major payments and crypto firms begin building infrastructure for autonomous software. Mastercard last week introduced Agent Pay for Machines, an initiative aimed at high- volume, always-on transactions between AI systems.
Metamask also recently unveiled Agent Wallet, a product that lets bots access the Ethereum ecosystem with built-in transaction protections.
For Alchemy, Agentcard sits at the intersection of payments, identity, and crypto infrastructure. The bet is that AI agents will not only search and recommend, but also spend, subscribe, and settle transactions across the internet.
