AgentCard by Alchemy links AI agents to Visa payments

Alchemy, the blockchain infrastructure firm behind the AgentCard identity and payment service for AI agents, has connected the product to Visa's Intelligent Commerce network — letting agents built on models from any provider, including OpenAI and Anthropic, execute online purchases on behalf of consumers without a human ever touching a checkout screen.

AgentCard is structured as a virtual ID and spending card for autonomous agents. Each provisioned agent receives a dedicated email address at agentcard.email and a fresh phone number, completing the identity layer agents need to sign up for services, clear verifications, and carry credentials equivalent to a human account holder. Transactions route through Visa-issued tokens, which means existing rewards, credit lines and card benefits stay intact — no new accounts, no new credentials. Where agent-native protocols are not yet supported, a routing layer falls back to single-use tokens.

Why it matters

Alchemy framed the launch in generational terms. "Every major computing shift has produced a new kind of economic actor," co-founder and CEO Nikil Viswanathan said. "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, and AgentCard is how that starts." The pitch is that agentic commerce needs both an identity primitive and a payments primitive before it can scale, and the identity piece is what most prior agent-payment projects have skipped.

The integration also signals where the major card networks are positioning. Stripe, Visa and Mastercard are all pushing hard into agentic commerce, and Alchemy's AgentCard joins that build-out as a crypto-native identity layer sitting on top of legacy rails rather than replacing them.

Market impact

The near-term market reaction is to Alchemy's broader ecosystem — the Alchemy Pay ($ACH) rail and the developer tools that sit alongside it — rather than to Visa.