Alchemy, a blockchain infrastructure provider, has announced the private beta of AgentPay, a tool designed to provide interoperability between the growing range of AI agent payment protocols.
The platform supports protocols from firms including Coinbase, Stripe, Visa, and Circle, and a general release is planned for the coming weeks.
AgentPay operates as a translation layer, routing payment instructions between different agentic payment protocols, including x402, MPP, and L402, without taking custody of funds. Merchants register their existing API with Alchemy, receive a new endpoint, and can then accept payments from agents operating across any supported protocol without needing to build separate integrations for each system.
Protocol fragmentation and infrastructure context
The launch addresses a structural challenge in the emerging agentic payments space, where multiple competing protocols have developed in parallel, including Coinbase's x402, Stripe and Paradigm's Machine Payments Protocol, and Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, among others. Without a common interoperability layer, merchants would need to integrate each protocol individually as the ecosystem expands, creating operational complexity and potential lock-in.
Furthermore, by positioning AgentPay as a protocol-agnostic translation layer, Alchemy aims to assume a routing and orchestration role in agentic finance, similar to how payment orchestration platforms operate in conventional payments, thereby reducing fragmentation for merchants while remaining network-neutral.
Alchemy provides developer tools and node services for blockchain application development and is widely used within the Web3 developer ecosystem. AgentPay extends that infrastructure positioning into the agentic commerce layer.
Commenting on the news, Guillaume Poncin, CTO of Alchemy, said that without a unifying layer, fragmentation across agentic payment protocols is not sustainable and will only increase as more systems launch. He described AgentPay's model as giving merchants a single endpoint through which any agent on any supported protocol can pay them.
