Rain just kicked off the Agentic Payments Alliance with a crew of more than 25 industry big-hitters from the worlds of payments, stablecoins, and AI. The founding lineup is stacked, featuring giants like Visa and Mastercard, blockchain networks Solana and Avalanche, Circle for stablecoins, and infrastructure providers like Fireblocks and Chainalysis.
The Alliance was formed to address a critical gap: as AI agents increasingly transact on behalf of humans, the infrastructure for authorization, fraud prevention, and settlement is still being defined.
Why agentic commerce needs standards
Because every research firm has a different take on what “agentic commerce” actually means, the global forecasts are all over the place:
By 2030, McKinsey projects between $3 trillion and $5 trillion, ARK Invest $9 trillion, and so on. But many foundational questions remain unresolved.
How should agents be authorized to spend? How does fraud detection work when software, not humans, initiates payments? How do loyalty and rewards travel with an agent across platforms?
The Alliance was formed to bring builders into the same conversation before these decisions are made in isolation by individual companies.
“No single company should get to decide how agents transact on someone’s behalf,” said Farooq Malik, co-founder and CEO of Rain.
The APA operates as a working coalition run collectively by its founding members, focusing on shared research, testing emerging standards for agent identity and authorization, and advocating on regulatory questions.
So far, this collaborative approach mirrors efforts by Visa, Stripe, and Google, each of which has released agent payment protocols over the past year.
What’s next for the Alliance
The Alliance’s early work includes testing standards for agent identity and authorization, developing shared frameworks, and engaging with regulators.
Founding members will also get early access to Rain’s Agentic Startup Program, an accelerator supporting early-stage companies building for agentic commerce, with the first cohort of five startups presenting at a demo day open to Alliance members.
The agent control layer: Rain’s technical foundation for the Agentic Payments Alliance
Rain’s Agent Control Layer and Scoped Cards, already in production, provide the technical underpinnings for the Alliance’s work. Think of these as handy tools that equip AI agents with reliable payment credentials that stay safe and contained, letting them handle transactions strictly within the lanes you set.
Scoped Cards let you easily lock down spending to just the right merchants, categories, or amounts, acting as a smart, programmable guardrail that stops any runaway AI spending in its tracks. This infrastructure addresses the “principal-agent problem” in agentic commerce: ensuring that agents act faithfully on behalf of their users.
