The Senate’s crypto market-structure bill needs seven Democratic votes to clear cloture. It has zero — and the ethics impasse that killed the bipartisan coalition has no obvious resolution before the August recess.
What Agent Identity Means When an AI agent books a flight, signs a contract, or moves money, someone — or something — needs to vouch for it. That vouching system is agent identity: the credential, capability boundary, and action record that tell the rest of the system which agent is acting, what it is allowed…
Agentic AI refers to autonomous, goal-driven systems that plan, use tools, and complete end-to-end tasks with minimal human supervision.
“Probably 99% of the issuer processing systems out in the world could process an agentic payment,” says Paymentology CTO Tim Joslyn. The issue is not the plumbing; the global infrastructure for moving money is already mature and functional. Instead, the challenge lies in recognizing these transactions and implementing the necessary identity and trust frameworks. The…
## Why agent identity matters Traditional identity systems assume two categories: humans who authenticate with passwords or biometrics, and service accounts that authenticate with static API keys. AI agents break this model in four ways: 1. **Agents are autonomous.** They make decisions and take actions without a human pressing a button for each step. 2.…
What is the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)? The Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) is a payment infrastructure protocol developed by Stripe and Tempo that enables AI agents and automated systems to execute payments programmatically across multiple payment rails. Launched on March 18, 2026, MPP provides a unified interface for agent-driven commerce, allowing AI systems to initiate,…
Agentic commerce is online shopping where AI agents handle discovery, evaluation, negotiation, and payment on the user’s behalf. Here is how the flow works, which protocols power it, and what changed in 2026.
An open, internet-native payment protocol that enables instant, automatic stablecoin payments directly over HTTP, reviving the long-dormant HTTP 402 ‘Payment Required’ status code to facilitate machine-to-machine and AI-agent transactions.
Section 404 of the CLARITY Act contains a narrow, technical carve-out that has become the most consequential battleground in stablecoin regulation. The provision prohibits interest-equivalent yield on payment stablecoins—a standard guardrail designed to prevent them from functioning as unregulated bank deposits—but includes a critical exception for transaction-based rewards. This specific mechanism has drawn the ire…
Note: This page covers tokenization in digital payments and blockchain finance—replacing sensitive data with secure placeholders and putting real-world assets on a blockchain. For tokenization in AI and large language models (breaking text into subword units like BPE, WordPiece, and SentencePiece), see AI Tokenization. Tokenization is one of those terms that sounds technical but describes…