The Greenfield of Agentic Payments. Cross-Network Settlement is Still Up for Grabs.
On a Consensus Miami panel in May 2026, Richard Widmann, Google Cloud's Global Head of Web3 Strategy, summarized the entire premise of the week in a single line: "An agent cannot get a bank account. It's not hard, it just is impossible." Sitting next to him, May Zabaneh, SVP of crypto at PayPal, called PYUSD "a very natural programmable layer for payments" and cited a PayPal survey showing 95 percent of merchants now see AI agent traffic on their sites. Only 20 percent have machine-readable catalogues. The shape of the gap is the entire opportunity.
The thesis underneath, restated by every serious panel that week: if agents are about to become the primary initiators of online transactions, the infrastructure has to be designed for callers that read documentation, retry on failure, and never sleep. McKinsey's number was the one most quoted from the stage. Up to $5 trillion in...
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