Agentic Payments Onchain: Notes from Ripple and tS4 Panel in Singapore

Last night I sat in on Agentic Payments Onchain, a panel hosted by Ripple and tS4. The conversation went straight to the questions I work on every day: how AI agents get identity, credentials, and an audit trail once they start moving money on banking surfaces.

Last night I went to Agentic Payments Onchain, a panel hosted by Ripple and tS4 in Singapore. It landed very close to the work I have been doing on AI agents, credentials, and identity for payments, so I took notes.

The panel:

- Joel Hun, Sr. DevRel at Ripple, moderating
- Chandler Fang, Founder of tS4 Labs
- Norman Bai, Head of APAC Growth for Gemini and Consumer Apps at Google
- Jacob Ko, Partner at Superscrypt

What follows are my notes and the claims that stood out. These are the panelists' views, not mine, unless I say otherwise.

The questions I wanted answered

I came in with two questions.

For the tS4 side: if banks and fintechs adopt agents, what do you actually do for audit, tracking, and credentials of AI agents that operate on banking surfaces?

For Google: what will the large platforms do to combine agentic payments with financial inclusion, so payments and access to payments reach underserved communities across the globe?

Segment one: the infrastructure is not ready

The honest part of the panel was about gaps.

The current banking ecosystem is not agent permeable. Today DeFi is far more compatible with agents than traditional rails, mostly because the surface is programmable and open. Regulation is not compatible yet, and the risk profile is still too high for agents to operate freely on bank surfaces.

Jacob Ko of Superscrypt named identity as the core blocker. Agentic identification, knowing which agent is acting and on whose authority, is still an unsolved problem. That maps exactly to what I keep running into: identity has to come before authority, policy, and any verdict you can audit.

Segment two: settlement is solved, identity and reputation are not

The framing here was that the settlement layer is already established. What is missing is the identity and reputation layer on top of it.

Superscrypt raised the sharp question: why would fintechs and banks not just provide AI payment agents directly themselves?

On the Google side, Norman Bai walked through the protocol stack:

- UPI style payment rails already integrated into e-commerce
- AP2, Google's Agent Payments Protocol
- x402 as a settlement layer protocol, with a facilitator that effectively replaces the acquirer at the merchant level

The recurring tension: this works well for DeFi, but how do you get it into TradFi? And there is the post-payment problem too. Chargebacks, exceptions, and disputes do not disappear when an agent is the buyer. The panel noted that x402 has handling for this in place.

Segment three: predictions

This is where it got bullish.

Chandler Fang expects real agentic shopping platforms in 2026, and transaction volume to grow roughly 10x in the next few years, driven by micro transactions. The logic: agents transact autonomously and far more often, more services get wrapped in an agentic interface, and companies will run agents that our agents transact with.

Norman Bai is bullish on agentic work. He pointed to a personal 24 hour Google agent expected later this year with agentic payments built in on Google's protocols, and stressed that an agent has to be fully trusted before you let it pay. He also sees agents as strong at research, and noted that with crypto being open by default, agents can spot opportunities in the open.

Jacob Ko brought the numbers. He cited x402 daily volume around 28k USD, roughly 15 million per year today, against a McKinsey projection of 3 to 5 trillion USD in agentic payments within ten years. His read: agent commerce is close to taking off.

Where I sit in this

This is not theoretical for me. My agent, Hermes, already runs on a Stripe integration and handles some of the subscriptions my workflow depends on, including signing up for them from scratch. So the agents that pay future is not a someday story on my side. It is already a small, working part of my day.

What I keep coming back to is the gap the panel kept circling: settlement is the easy part. The hard part is identity, credentials, and an audit trail you can stand behind when an agent moves money on a regulated surface. That is the exact problem I am building toward with my work on verifiable identity and policy backed verdicts.

If you are working on agent identity, credentials, or payments infrastructure, I would love to compare notes.

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#AgenticPayments #AIAgents #Payments #DigitalIdentity #Credentials #Ripple #x402 #Fintech #DeFi

Topics: Agentic Payments, AI Agents, Payments, Digital Identity, Credentials, Ripple, Fintech, DeFi