Alchemy has rolled out a new product called Agentcard, built on Visa’s Intelligent Commerce platform, that lets AI agents independently buy goods and services using dedicated payment credentials. The launch marks the company’s first major push into agentic commerce — the idea that software agents, not just humans, will become active participants in economic transactions.
What Agentcard does
Agentcard gives AI agents their own payment tools, complete with spend controls and unique credentials. The product works with both standard card-based payments and newer rails designed specifically for agent-to-agent transactions. The goal is to let agents handle purchases without a human having to approve every single swipe or click. Alchemy says the system relies on trusted identity and payment infrastructure already familiar to Visa’s network.
Why Visa and Alchemy teamed up
Visa Intelligent Commerce is the payments giant’s framework for enabling machine-to-machine payments. By embedding Agentcard into that ecosystem, Alchemy is betting that the next wave of e-commerce won’t just be people clicking “buy” — bots, assistants, and autonomous software will need to pay for APIs, compute time, data feeds, and even physical goods. The spend controls in Agentcard let a company set limits on what an agent can buy and how much it can spend, so there’s a leash on the autonomy.
Alchemy’s bet on agentic commerce
Alchemy is best known for its blockchain infrastructure, but this move signals a broader ambition. Agentic commerce — where software acts as a buyer — is still in its early days. Most AI agents today can browse or recommend but can’t actually complete a transaction with their own wallet. Agentcard is designed to close that gap. The company hasn’t disclosed which customers are testing the product or how many transactions have been processed so far. It also hasn’t said whether there are any specific verticals it’s targeting first, such as cloud services or digital subscriptions.
The product is available now through Alchemy’s platform. Developers building AI agents can integrate Agentcard via API to give their bots spending power. Visa’s involvement provides the existing merchant acceptance network, meaning agents can theoretically pay anywhere Visa is accepted — though the product currently requires the agent to have a linked funding source, such as a business account.
The broader question — how fast businesses will trust AI agents to spend real money — remains open. Alchemy has at least given them the tool.
