Let’s talk about the application scenarios of the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) launched by Google Cloud a few days ago in conjunction with crypto:
🔸Stablecoins (USDC/USDT/others): A typical settlement asset for x402, due to its price stability and ease of compliance. Coinbase's x402 focuses on stablecoins.
🔸Smart contracts & DeFi protocols: Agents can reinvest the funds they receive into staking, lending, liquidity pools, or restaking/verifiable computing services like EigenLayer (there are already collaborative examples of EigenLayer in the AP2 community), allowing agents to not just "spend money" but also "allocate capital for users." (Note: This step involves prior authorization regarding compliance and risk tolerance.)
🔸Oracles (price feeds): Automated strategies often rely on on-chain oracles (like Chainlink) to trigger buy/sell stop thresholds (for example, "when ETH/USD drops to X, buy Y USDC"), making oracles an essential data source for agents to make economic decisions.
🔸Cross-chain / relayer / bridges: The x402 is designed to be chain-agnostic, and when executing cross-chain transactions, it will call bridges or relayers to submit stablecoins or assets that have been swapped to the target chain. Ecosystems like Cloudflare / Coinbase are building multi-chain adapters and relayer libraries for x402.
AP2 is referred to as the "zero-trust architecture of payments." It does not trust any single point but ensures through cryptographic signatures that:
• Every transaction you authorize has a traceable record.
• Agents cannot forge intentions.
• All operations are automatically logged (Accountability).
From A2A (Agent-to-Agent) enabling different AIs to communicate and collaborate to MCP (Model Context Protocol) unifying context sharing, and then to AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) allowing AIs to truly trade and settle, the integrated mission of agents is basically completed, and we can also look forward to the future integration of DEX with such agents.
Announcing Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open, shared protocol that provides a common language for secure, compliant transactions between agents and merchants.
AP2 can be used as an extension of the A2A protocol and MCP. Learn how it works ↓
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