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Agentic finance glossary
- ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)
- The Stripe/OpenAI-driven open spec for completing consumer purchases inside AI chat surfaces — catalog, cart, and checkout exposed to assistants. Deep dive →
- Agent wallet
- A programmable account that lets an AI agent spend autonomously within hard, code-enforced limits (caps, allow-lists, approvals) without holding its owner's private keys. Deep dive →
- Agentic commerce
- Buying and selling conducted end-to-end by an AI agent on a person's behalf: discovery, comparison, cart, checkout, payment. Deep dive →
- Agentic payments
- Transactions initiated and executed by AI agents rather than humans — from sub-cent API metering to assistant-driven purchases. Forecast to grow from ~$8B (2026) to $1.5T (2030). Deep dive →
- AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol)
- Google's open protocol for the authorization layer: cryptographically verifiable mandates proving an agent may spend, and within what limits. Deep dive →
- Autonomous agent
- Software that plans and executes multi-step tasks — including economic ones like purchasing — under delegated human authority rather than step-by-step instruction.
- Base
- Coinbase's Ethereum Layer-2 network; the default settlement venue for x402 payments and the chain carrying most agentic-payment volume.
- Bazaar
- Coinbase's agent-facing directory of x402-payable tools and APIs (10k+ listings) — how paying agents discover services.
- Facilitator
- The service that verifies (or settles) an x402 payment before the seller releases the response, so API servers never run blockchain infrastructure. Deep dive →
- GENIUS Act
- The 2025 U.S. stablecoin legislation credited with the regulatory clarity that let institutions build on stablecoin rails at scale.
- HTTP 402 (Payment Required)
- A status code reserved in the original HTTP spec and dormant for ~30 years, activated by x402 as the web-native way to demand payment for a request.
- Machine economy
- The emerging market in which software is both buyer and seller — millions of small automated transactions for compute, data, and services. Deep dive →
- Mandate
- A signed, verifiable proof of delegated spending authority ("this agent may spend up to $X for Y") — the core object of AP2.
- Metering
- Charging per unit of machine consumption (per request, per call, per crawl) instead of by subscription — the dominant billing model of the agent economy.
- Micropayment
- A payment too small for card economics (typically under $1); the x402 network average is roughly $0.32 and many payments are fractions of a cent.
- MPC wallet
- Custody using multi-party computation: key material is split so no single party — including the agent — can sign alone. The enterprise agent-wallet model (Fireblocks, Circle).
- Pay-per-crawl
- Serving AI bots a machine-readable price (via 402) instead of a block or free access — turning crawler traffic into revenue. Deep dive →
- PYUSD
- PayPal's dollar stablecoin; the most visible challenger to USDC's ~98.6% share of machine-payment settlement.
- Session keys
- Temporary, scope-limited signing keys granted to an agent for a task or time window — spending authority that expires by design.
- Smart account
- An on-chain account (account abstraction) whose spending policy is code in the account itself — the developer-velocity agent-wallet model (Coinbase CDP, Crossmint).
- Stablecoin
- A token pegged to fiat (usually USD) providing a fixed unit of account; the settlement medium for nearly all machine payments. Why agents use them →
- USDC
- Circle's dollar stablecoin — the default settlement asset of x402 and ~98.6% of machine payments, mostly on Base.
- x402
- The open protocol (Coinbase → Linux Foundation) that revives HTTP 402 so any server can charge an AI agent a stablecoin micropayment per request. Deep dive →
- x402 Foundation
- The Linux Foundation body governing x402 since July 14, 2026 — 40 member organizations including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google, AWS, Circle, and Coinbase.
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