PayPal and Google tell Consensus Miami: agentic commerce will run on crypto rails!

Senior executives from Google Cloud and PayPal told Consensus Miami on Thursday that AI agents are structurally locked out of traditional banking — and that crypto is the only viable payments layer for the coming wave of agentic commerce. Google Cloud's global head of Web3 strategy, Richard Widmann, put it plainly: "An agent cannot get a bank account. It's not hard, it just is impossible." Crypto, he said, is "a fantastic machine-readable interface for payments."

To anchor the infrastructure, Google has launched the Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2), donated it to the FIDO Foundation, and signed up more than 120 partners including PayPal. Widmann drew a parallel to the x402 payment standard given to the Linux Foundation — open standards, he argued, are the only foundation that scales.

PayPal's SVP of crypto, May Zabaneh, framed agents as the company's next commerce channel after…