Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Wednesday, September 17th, and today we are talking about Google's new agent payments protocol and what relationship it has, if any, with the crypto space. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.

ly slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, well, Google has announced a new open source payment

standard to allow AI agents to use stable coins. A little bit of background for this. Right now,

obviously, we are in the midst of the agent revolution. What started with a whole generation of AI assistance

which help us do our work has now moved to agents which have more autonomy and which can actually

do big chunks of work for us. The total capability set of agents is progressively increasing,

taking on bigger and bigger chunks of work, longer and longer workflows. And as that's happening,

companies are building standards around agents to allow them to function more broadly and

interact in ways that weren't possible before. You might have heard of MCP or the Model

Context Protocol, which is basically like a data API specifically made for agents. So if you

have a particular set of data, you can connect it to an MCP server,

and then any agents can easily plug into that MCP server and get access to that set of data.

There is also an agent-to-agent communication standard that Google released called A-to-A,

and all of these things amount to expanding the use cases for agents and accelerating their

development. So this new standard, AP2, is explicitly designed

to work with MCP and A2A, and is of course about payments. Now, one thing that is really notable is that

this was developed in collaboration with Coinbase and in consultation with more than 60 other

partners, including American Express, Etsy, MasterCard, PayPal, Revolut, and Union Pay.

Functionally, this is Google and Coinbase establishing a standard that would allow AI agents to transact.

Again, if you want more on the technical side of the project, I talk about it on today's AI Daily Brief,

...