t54 Partners with Mastercard to Bring Its Trust Layer to Agent Pay for Machines

Mastercard envisions a future where businesses create services for AI agents to buy and use. Operating at machine speed, these agents could transact with each other continuously at high velocity, executing chains of transactions, including microtransactions—some only fractions of a cent. Unlike traditional point-of-sale or person-to-merchant payments, which are discrete and user-initiated, these transactions are programmatic, always-on, and executed between systems in the background of digital commerce.

Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M) is Mastercard's answer to this shift: a new service that allows these transactions to be permissioned, orchestrated, and settled at machine speed across its global payments network. It builds on Mastercard's Agent Pay program, introduced in 2025—where Agent Pay defines how trusted AI agents participate in payments, Agent Pay for Machines is designed for automated, micro- and machine-driven transactions that happen continuously in the background of digital commerce.

Agent Pay for Machines establishes a trusted system for machine-driven transactions through a set of foundational capabilities:

• Credentialing: Every agent is credentialed, and with Verifiable Intent, can be recognized and transact with trust across ecosystems.
• Permissioning: Organizations can set authorization rules and spending limits that are programmatically enforced, ensuring transactions stay within defined parameters.
• Transacting: Verified participants can connect and transact across providers and systems, enabling continuous, high-frequency automated commerce.
• Settling: Supports reliable, guaranteed multi-rail settlement across cards, accounts, and stablecoins.

As payments become continuous, embedded, and executed at machine speed, a new requirement emerges: infrastructure that can keep up. Businesses need peace of mind they will get paid. Agents need transactions to move instantly, with every transaction completed securely and as expected. This is where t54 comes in.

"Agentic commerce needs payment infrastructure that can support autonomous execution and reliable settlement. Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines is a meaningful step in that direction, connecting agent-initiated payments to global infrastructure built for real-world scale. By partnering with Mastercard, t54 brings its trust layer to Machine Payments, adding real-time transaction-level risk assessment, Know Your Agent verification and traceability across the payment lifecycle. This helps create a clear evidence layer for agent authorization, chargebacks, dispute resolution, and liability review, making agent-led payments more secure, auditable and accountable."

— Chandler Fang, Co-founder, t54 Labs

Mastercard is collaborating with a broad set of partners to validate priority use cases, establish common rules, and accelerate adoption across industries. t54 Labs joins more than 30 initial participants and supporters, including Aave Labs, Adyen, Ant International, BVNK, Checkout.com, Cloudflare, Coinbase, Getnet by Santander, Global Payments, OKX, Polygon, RippleX, Solana Foundation, Stripe, and Tempo.

Together with Agent Pay and Verifiable Intent, Agent Pay for Machines reflects Mastercard's continued investment in building trusted, open infrastructure for autonomous, agent-driven, and machine-driven payments—and t54 is proud to help make that infrastructure secure, auditable, and accountable from day one.

Read the full announcement on mastercard.com.