Mike Hale Rain has launched the Agentic Payments Alliance, a coalition of more than two dozen founding members including Visa, Mastercard, Solana, Circle, and Fiserv, to set shared standards for how AI agents make payments on a user's behalf. The alliance was announced August 18, 2026, and its early work covers agent identity, authorization standards, fraud detection, and regulatory advocacy.
Rain convenes the group but doesn't own it. The Agentic Payments Alliance operates as a collective working group run by its founding members, who set the charter and mission together rather than adopting one company's roadmap.
"No single company should get to decide how agents transact on someone's behalf. That has to come from the platforms building the rails, the regulators setting the rules, and the innovators closest to how agents are actually being used today."
— Farooq Malik, Co-founder and CEO, Rain
Who signed on as a founding member
The founding roster spans card networks, processors, crypto infrastructure, and blockchains: Avalanche, Basis Theory, Chainalysis, Circle, Coinflow, Crossmint, delta Network, Episode Six, Evertec, Fireblocks, Fiserv, Kala, Lithic, Mastercard, Monad, PayOS, Rain, Remitly, Rialo by Subzero Labs, Sardine, Shift4, Solana, Turnkey, Uniswap Labs, Visa, and Yuno.
Visa and Mastercard have spent decades writing the payment rules everyone else implements, and both are already building their own agentic commerce products. Here they've joined a coalition where a blockchain and a stablecoin issuer hold equal footing with them.
Solana signed on as a founding member, giving the network a hand in writing the agent payment rules its own developers will build against. The standards this group produces around agent identity and authorization are the ones Solana payment programs will eventually need to speak.
What problem the alliance is trying to solve
An AI agent that buys something on your behalf breaks assumptions the payments stack was built on. Card networks authenticate a cardholder, not a piece of software acting for one. Fraud systems flag behavior that doesn't look human, which is precisely what an agent's behavior is. Authorization was designed around a person tapping approve, not a delegated budget an agent spends against over weeks.
The alliance's stated focus areas map directly onto those gaps:
Agent identity and authorization: testing emerging standards for proving which agent is transacting and what it's been permitted to do
Shared research and frameworks: common reference material instead of every company solving the same problems privately
Fraud detection: adapting risk models for transactions that are legitimately automated
Loyalty and rewards integration: working out how existing programs apply when an agent is the one buying
Regulatory advocacy: engaging regulators on agentic commerce questions before rules get written without industry input
Mastercard framed the timing as the reason to organize now.
"The risk in a moment like this is not that the industry moves too slowly. It's that innovation outpaces alignment."
— Sherri Haymond, EVP, Global Head of Digital Commercialization, Mastercard
McKinsey projects global agentic commerce will reach $3 trillion to $5 trillion by 2030, which is the number the participants are organizing around. Standards set in isolation at that scale mean incompatible systems and a fragmented merchant experience.
Rain's position and what founding members get
Rain is enterprise stablecoin payments infrastructure serving neobanks, platforms, developers, and AI agents, with more than 100 organizations using it. The company is a Visa and Mastercard Principal Member, giving its card products access to over 175 million merchant locations across more than 200 countries.
It has already shipped agent-specific infrastructure: an Agent Control Layer and Scoped Cards, payment credentials built to limit what an agent can transact against. Rain brings a working implementation to the standards conversation.
Founding members also get early access to Rain's Agentic Startup Program, an accelerator for teams building in the space.
The Agentic Payments Alliance isn't the only group at this
Rain's coalition joins an already-crowded standards field. Google and Mastercard are among the names backing a FIDO Alliance effort to develop interoperable agentic standards, with Google donating its open protocol and Mastercard contributing its Verifiable Intent trust layer. Mastercard now sits in both camps.
Competing standards bodies working the same problem is how most payment standards have historically started, and it usually ends in either convergence or a long period of implementing several specs at once. For developers building agent payments on Solana, that means watching which specification the merchants and processors actually adopt, not just which coalition has the longest member list.
Read More: Rain Launches the Agentic Payments Alliance