Agentic payments fall into two scenarios that today’s payment systems barely serve:
• Micropayments between agents
• Commerce payments
The first one is obvious — and it’s where most startups are focused today: extremely high-frequency, low-value transactions.
But even in regular commerce, more and more payments will be delegated to agents. This creates a whole new set of unsolved payment problems.
The biggest unlock in this second scenario is a portable, cumulative reputation identity — for whoever is paying: a person, an agent, or an institution.
This could sharply reduce payment costs across many contexts and enable new payment models, like reputation-based credit (pay-later) for agents.
The core shift is that payment reputation moves from the platform to the payer.