Alchemy announced on September 17 that AgentCard, its unified identity and payments product for AI agents, now supports Mastercard payment credentials through an integration with Mastercard Agent Pay. The pairing gives developers a single setup path for agents that can complete online purchases wherever Mastercard is accepted, with user authorization and issuer controls built in.
Highlights#
- One CLI command provisions an agent in under a minute with a dedicated email address, phone number, stablecoin wallet, and one-time-use Mastercard credentials. The wallet connects agents to emerging agentic payment protocols; the card credentials cover the many online merchants still running on traditional credit card rails.
- The Mastercard credentials are tokenized and one-time-use, linked to a user's existing Mastercard. Rewards, credit lines, and card benefits carry over, with no new accounts or credentials to create.
- Users and issuers set the boundaries: purchase limits, merchant categories, and where transactions are allowed. Agents can only act inside those approved limits.
- AgentCard is designed to support Verifiable Intent, Mastercard's framework for proving an agent acted within what the user actually authorized: what was approved, under what conditions, and by whom.
- Alchemy CEO Nikil Viswanathan framed the shift as agents moving from assistants to software that takes action for people. Mastercard's Sherri Haymond said trust, safeguards, and consumer control are what carry agentic commerce from experimentation to everyday use.
Why it matters#
The design bundles identity, authorization limits, and settlement rails into one product, which is the real unlock in agent payments. One-time-use scoped credentials are a cousin of escrow on card rails, and the stablecoin wallet points agents toward on-chain settlement. Both are the plumbing autonomous agents need before they can trade with each other at scale.