Alchemy unveils Visa-powered virtual payment card for AI agents

Blockchain infrastructure provider Alchemy is launching a new AI-focused Virtual Visa card, called AgentCard. In short, it's a card and identity solution designed to enable AI agents to operate autonomously in the real world. 

AgentCard was built via an integration with Visa Intelligent Commerce, the payment giant’s portfolio of AI solutions to support “AI-driven commerce experiences at scale.” 

The virtual cards will support tokenized card payments and crypto when accepted by merchants, alongside “emerging agent payment protocols,” like the Coinbase-incubated x402 and Stripe’s Machine Payments Protocol (MPP).

AgentCard follows a growing number of similar products, many of which are built using Visa’s payments infrastructure. Tether-backed wallet startup Oobit, for instance, rolled out a way to essentially give bots virtual corporate Visa spending cards so they can spend down USDT balances.

Mastercard last week unveiled a major initiative called Agent Pay for Machines that is designed to support high-volume, “always-on” transactions between AIs, with support from dozens of fintechs and crypto providers. 

MetaMask also unveiled Agent Wallet earlier this month, providing a gateway for bots to access the wider Ethereum ecosystem.

Like many of these earlier releases, Alchemy’s AgentCard will feature built-in spend controls, allowing users to set merchant restrictions, per-transaction limits, and budgets, among other guidelines. 

The system will “default” to Visa-issued tokens, but will support crypto or emerging "agent-native" payment protocols when available. “As merchant and network adoption grows, AgentCard automatically upgrades the payment path without requiring reconfiguration,” the announcement said. 

The setup process, conducted through a single API, provides developers and their bots with a Visa payment token, a dedicated email address, phone number, and crypto wallet.

Alchemy, described by some as the "AWS of web3," is a blockchain infrastructure platform behind a significant chunk of onchain activity. Its founder, Nikil Viswanathan, has long been a booster of the idea that crypto was built for AI agents, not humans.

"The hardest part of deploying an agent today has nothing to do with intelligence, it is getting the agent set up to actually operate in the world," said Flor Ronsmans De Vry, Co-Creator of AgentCard. "Whether you're building on OpenAI or Anthropic, AgentCard collapses that setup into one step. The next phase is making sure every payment rail an agent might need is available the moment a developer wants it."