Mastercard Launches Agent Pay for Machines With Solana Foundation Among 30+ Partners

Mastercard today launched Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M), a new service designed to enable AI agents to conduct autonomous, high-frequency micropayments across its global network. Solana SOL$120.62+3.2% Foundation is among more than 30 named launch partners providing settlement infrastructure for the platform.

AP4M builds on Mastercard's existing Agent Pay program, extending it to handle the automated, background transactions that emerge when AI agents act on human instructions, paying for compute, data, APIs, and services in chains of machine-initiated actions. The company describes the need with a concrete example: an entrepreneur asking an AI agent to build an online storefront could trigger a cascade of purchases (domain names, hosting, images, checkout integrations) each settled autonomously within a defined budget.

"Machine payments can make it possible for services to be bought and sold among agents at fundamentally different scales than payments today — very high volumes, very small values, very fast and at extremely low latency," said Jorn Lambert, Mastercard's chief product officer, who added that AP4M "will create the conditions for a superbloom of AI business models."

How AP4M's Four-Layer Architecture Works

AP4M rests on four capabilities. Each agent is credentialed through Mastercard's Verifiable Intent framework, giving it a recognized identity across ecosystems. Organizations can then set programmatically enforced authorization rules and spending limits, with a transacting layer that connects verified participants across providers and networks. At the base, multi-rail settlement spans cards, accounts, and stablecoins.

That last element is where Solana enters the picture. The Solana Foundation's role is as a settlement rail provider for stablecoin-denominated machine payments, contributing Solana's high throughput and low transaction costs to the AP4M stack.

"Right now, there is an opportunity to define how AI agents will seamlessly pay for the goods and services they need," said Rishin Sharma, head of AI Growth at Solana Foundation. "The infrastructure powering these transactions will need to operate across stablecoins, card networks, and other payment rails. Solana is built to enable these types of solutions at scale, and we're excited to work alongside Mastercard."

30+ Launch Partners Span Payments, Crypto, and AI Infrastructure

The partner list spans payments infrastructure, blockchain networks, and AI tooling. Alongside the Solana Foundation, launch participants include Adyen, Stripe, Checkout.com, Global Payments, and Getnet by Santander on the payments side; Aave Labs, Coinbase cbBTC$83,977.26-0.3%, Polygon, and RippleX from crypto; and infrastructure providers including Cloudflare, Alchemy, Anchorage Digital, BVNK, MoonPay, Utila, Turnkey, Crossmint, and Tempo, among others.

Two partners, Coinbase and OKX, have simultaneously released their own agent payment protocols. Coinbase has developed x402, an open standard for agent payments, while OKX has built its own Agent Payments Protocol. Both companies are collaborating with Mastercard while also advancing independent standards, reflecting an industry still working out which protocols will define agentic commerce.

This launch is distinct from Mastercard's June 3 announcement extending stablecoin card settlement to Solana using USDC, PYUSD, and RLUSD, which covered traditional card settlement rails. AP4M addresses a different layer: the programmatic, machine-driven transactions that run in the background of agent-driven commerce.

The Solana Foundation's participation also continues a stretch of AI payments momentum for the network. Earlier this month, the Foundation and Google Cloud launched Pay.sh, a developer tool enabling AI agents to accept and send payments natively on Solana using stablecoins.

Mastercard's approach differentiates on institutional trust infrastructure (guaranteed settlement, agent credentialing, and the governance layer of its existing global network) rather than positioning primarily as a crypto-native or open-source protocol. Stripe's Machine Payments Protocol is among the competing standards in the same space.