VercatusAgent payments protocol
Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), announced 16 September 2025 with more than 60 organisations (among them Adyen, American Express, Coinbase, Mastercard, PayPal and Worldpay), lets an agent pay on a user's behalf using cryptographically signed mandates as auditable proof of what the user approved. Version 0.1 used Intent and Cart Mandates; v0.2 (released 28 April 2026, focused on human-not-present purchases) specifies a Checkout Mandate and a Payment Mandate as SD-JWT verifiable credentials, each either open (user constraints such as allowed merchants, line items, amount range, budget or recurrence) or closed (one specific checkout or payment), across five roles: shopping agent, credential provider, merchant, merchant payment processor and trusted surface. AP2 v0.2 describes itself as a security layer inside a commerce protocol and is designed to be compatible with UCP.
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