AI agents are about to become significant buyers.
Literally. Booking flights, buying domains, paying for compute. The question isn’t whether agents will transact. It’s who controls the rails.
Everyone is racing to own them. Stripe and OpenAI built ACP. Open licensed. Governed by its founders. Google announced AP2. Coinbase pushed x402 on Base, where Coinbase collects the interest on every USDC in the float. x402 claims 50 million transactions. Daily volume: $28,000. Mostly testing.
Same playbook every platform runs. Establish the standard. Extract the rent. The winner doesn’t need the best product. They need to be the default.
Bitcoin doesn’t play by these rules. L402 combines Lightning with HTTP: any agent pays for any service in under a second, fractions of a cent, no signup, no pre-existing relationship. No KYC. No key that can freeze your funds. No gatekeeper collecting interest.
The next payment war is already underway. Most people haven’t noticed yet.