Monad and Avalanche have joined the Agentic Payments Alliance, a coalition launched to establish infrastructure and standards for autonomous agent commerce. Rain announced the initiative with 26 founding members spanning payments processors, stablecoin issuers, blockchain networks, and AI platforms.
Visa, Mastercard, Circle, Solana, Fiserv, and Remitly are among the members. The alliance will address technical and regulatory gaps as AI agents assume roles in commerce, from negotiating transactions to managing recurring payments without human intermediation.
Rain, which offers infrastructure for agent-to-merchant payments, organized the effort to coordinate on shared challenges rather than have each member build separately. Early work will focus on agent identity verification, authorization protocols, fraud detection, and regulatory compliance across jurisdictions where members operate. The group plans to publish working papers and technical specifications for members to adopt.
McKinsey projects the agent-driven commerce market could reach between $3 trillion and $5 trillion by 2030. Current agent systems remain limited, but major blockchain networks and payment rails are preparing infrastructure for expanded deployment.
Avalanche and Monad both focus on transaction throughput. Avalanche processes transactions through a suite of subnets; Monad is designed for parallel execution within a single chain. Circle's USDC stablecoin and Solana's payment-focused design position those networks as settlement layers if adoption accelerates. Both Avalanche and Monad could serve similar roles.
The alliance's scope, from technical standards to regulatory guidance, reflects the breadth of work required before agent commerce scales. Authorization frameworks and fraud prevention are foundational; how agents identify themselves to merchants and how transactions are logged will likely shape liability and compliance rules. Remitly's inclusion brings expertise in cross-border remittances, where agents could reduce friction and cost.
The 26-member founding group represents roughly equivalent weight from traditional payments (Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv), blockchain networks (Solana, Avalanche, Monad, Circle), and specialized AI or transfer platforms. If the group publishes binding standards, adoption by Visa and Mastercard would affect billions of merchants; if standards remain advisory, fragmentation among blockchain-based agents could persist. The document to watch is the alliance's technical specification release, which will clarify whether members committed to interoperable agent identity and authorization systems or permitted each to develop proprietary approaches.
