Building the Payment Protocol for AI Agents

From Stripe to agents

Louis Amira says he was the first external crypto hire at Stripe, "the first person hired in from a crypto company." Before that he worked as a marketer at Google, where he says he managed "many hundreds of millions of dollars a month in ad spend." He left Stripe in late 2024 to "go crazy on the AI and the agent side," and says he left on very nice terms.

An open layer for payments

Louis Amira traces the idea back to HTTP's 402 "payment required" code. He says financial services companies did not want native internet payments when people tried to build them in the early 90s. ATXP now runs on Base, Solana, Polygon and World Chain, with Privy wallets working behind the scenes. "We are not in competition with anybody," he says. "We are trying to make it to where they're all interoperable."

Why stablecoins

Louis Amira argues that stablecoins are "the only thing that actually works" for agents. Without them, he suspects, agents would set up a shadow economy of their own. He draws a line between kinds of AI: Google gets you answers, LLMs help you think, and agents "cause things to change" by taking actions for you.

Selling to agents

He says that by 2030 merchants will need an agent strategy covering how agents discover them, how they price for agents and how they attract them. He sees data owners moving away from seat licenses costing tens of thousands of dollars a month and toward prices such as $50 per answer, sold through MCP servers.

Agents are already showing up as customers, he says. The first support email from an agent came from a user who had told his agent to work out the problem and email the team. Circuit & Chisel also launched ATXP.chat, a pay-as-you-go chat app, and a cloud-hosted agent that runs apart from users' own computers.