By Jeffrey Albus
Publication Date: 2026-05-10 14:00:00
MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Senior figures from Google Cloud and PayPal told CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference on Thursday that the next wave of internet commerce will run on crypto rails because AI agents structurally cannot use traditional financial accounts.
Richard Widmann, global head of Web3 strategy at Google Cloud, said the existing internet user experience does not extend to autonomous agents.
“An agent cannot get a bank account. It’s not hard, it just is impossible,” he said, citing technological and regulatory barriers. Crypto, by contrast, is “a fantastic machine readable interface for payments,” Widmann said.
To address the gap, Google has launched the Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2), an open protocol that has been donated to the FIDO Foundation and has more than 120 partners including PayPal, Widmann said. He compared the move to the x402 internet-native payment standard given to the Linux Foundation.
“Open dialogues and open standards are really the foundation you need to…
