Agentic payments hit 140 million transactions in nine months. Nobody has solved who is actually in charge.

Agentic payments hit 140 million transactions in nine months. Nobody has solved who is actually accountable.

Coinbase x402, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard all launched agent-to-service payment protocols this year. They solve how agents talk to payment rails. None solve the harder problem.

Spending limits run on the same software stack as the agent. If the server is compromised, every constraint disappears. The proposed fix is hardware-enforced trust: keys and policies on-chip, where software cannot override them.

But hardware does not answer the legal question. When an agent buys something at 3am while you sleep and it goes wrong, who pays? User, vendor, merchant, or bank?

If you are designing fintech with agentic features, build the accountability flow before you build the payment flow. The protocol is the easy part.