AI agents are moving money autonomously, but financial institutions have no way to verify who actually authorized the transaction. Solana's x402 payment protocol has processed roughly $50 billion in volume across approximately 150,000 merchant endpoints, while Baselayer, an identity infrastructure company, just raised $35 million to solve the trust problem that's emerged as agentic commerce scales from demos to production.

The technical plumbing for machine-to-machine payments already works. An AI agent hits a protected endpoint, receives a 402 Payment Required response with pricing terms, authorizes a stablecoin payment, and retries the request with proof of payment attached. Solana has handled roughly 180 million x402 transactions since the protocol launched about a year ago, and the infrastructure is now referenced in the documentation and workflows of Cloudflare, Stripe, and Amazon Web Services.

But here's the problem: when an AI agent spends money on your behalf, how does a bank or merchant know you actually authorized it? That's the identity crisis at the heart of agentic commerce, and it's moving faster than the trust infrastructure can keep up.

Why Did Identity Suddenly Become Critical for AI Payments?

The scale of agent adoption caught the financial system off guard. In June, Stripe reported that 70 percent of the commands used to access data through its API now come from AI agents. Over the past year, Visa, Mastercard, and American Express have all shipped agent commerce protocols, and Shopify turned on agentic sales channels by default for roughly one million merchants.

That creates a new identity problem for financial infrastructure built to recognize people and businesses, not autonomous software acting on their behalf. Before a bank, merchant, or platform lets an agent transact, it has to answer three critical questions: who does this agent represent, is it authorized to act, and can it trust the party on the other side.

"Every era of commerce has required a new trust layer, but historically that infrastructure gets built only after fraud and abuse make the problem impossible to ignore. Agentic commerce is moving too fast for the industry to repeat that mistake," said Jonathan Awad, co-founder and CEO of Baselayer.

Jonathan Awad, Co-founder and CEO at Baselayer

Baselayer already answers equivalent questions for businesses. Its platform provides identity verification and risk infrastructure to 2,300 financial institutions and payments companies, and has helped customers prevent more than $1 billion in fraud losses. Founded in 2024, the company is now extending that same infrastructure to autonomous agents.

How Is Baselayer Building Trust Into Agentic Payments?

• Cryptographic Agent Identity: Baselayer's Agentic Identity Suite enables financial institutions to know, cryptographically, which agent they are dealing with and who that agent represents, solving the core problem that static fraud controls cannot recognize autonomous software.
• Authorization Verification: The platform determines whether an agent is actually authorized to act on behalf of a specific person or business, preventing unauthorized transactions before they occur.
• Risk Assessment for Machine Actors: Baselayer extends its existing fraud prevention capabilities to agents, helping institutions distinguish between legitimate autonomous activity and sophisticated attacks that exploit the novelty of agent-based commerce.

The $35 million Series A round was led by M13, with participation from Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital, and Matt Thompson of Socure. M13 manages $2.2 billion in assets and has backed 18 companies at seed or Series A that later reached unicorn status.

"AI agents are rapidly becoming economic actors, but the identity infrastructure underneath commerce was never designed for software that can open accounts, make purchases, move money, or enter into transactions on someone else's behalf. That creates an enormous new trust problem, and we believe identity will become one of the foundational infrastructure layers of the agentic economy," said Karl Alomar, Managing Partner at M13.

Karl Alomar, Managing Partner at M13

Where Is x402 Actually Being Used in Production?

Solana has the clearest public adoption story. According to a Solana Foundation and Coinbase webinar recap, the network handles 76 percent of all x402 transactions, processing 23.2 million transactions in four weeks. The next-largest network processed 3.39 million transactions in the same period.

Most x402 transactions settle under 50 cents, a scale of micropayment that traditional card networks were never built to clear economically. Solana's infrastructure advantage includes more than $15 billion in circulating stablecoins, roughly $10 trillion in cumulative transfers, 400-millisecond block times, and fees near a thousandth of a cent.

XRP Ledger has documented its own x402 implementation settling in XRP and RLUSD, with deterministic finality meaning that payment verification lands in three to five seconds according to the documentation. Cardano is named as a potential challenger in this market, but no comparable live transaction volume, merchant endpoints, or agent-payment demonstrations have been documented on the network yet.

The webinar's live demos showed concrete use cases. Using pay.sh, a Solana-built command-line directory of x402-payable endpoints, an agent located the correct endpoint, paid a one-cent fee, and returned live token-volume rankings without an API key. A second demo on AWOL, Coinbase's comparable wallet-based client, chained a social-content pull into a video-generation call, with the agent funding and paying for the entire workflow autonomously, a task that would otherwise take 30 minutes to an hour of manual key provisioning.

Will Micropayments Actually Drive Token Demand?

The deeper structural question is whether x402 and comparable protocols will create lasting demand for native tokens like SOL, XRP, or ADA. x402 and comparable protocols settle in stablecoins, not in native tokens. Stablecoins on Solana have already scaled across cross-border payments, remittances, and store-of-value use cases well before agentic payments entered the picture, which means high transaction counts on any of these chains do not automatically translate into equivalent token demand.

Fee capture, validator activity, or liquidity effects could eventually matter for native tokens, but the primary evidence documented so far focuses on payment volume and merchant endpoints, not token-level economic outcomes. What's actually being tested is whether machine-to-machine payments become a recurring commercial pattern or stay confined to conference demos and testnet tutorials.

Baselayer is helping to establish and promote the industry standards the agentic economy will run on, including the FIDO Alliance Authentication Working Group, Legal Context Protocol, and the x402 Identity Working Group alongside companies like Cloudflare, Google, Visa, and Mastercard. This standardization effort suggests that the infrastructure layer for agentic commerce is moving from experimental to foundational.