Mastercard opens early access to Agent Pay for Machines, demoed live at Cloudflare Connect

Mastercard opened early access to Agent Pay for Machines, a system that lets AI agents discover services, agree to terms, and pay for them within human-set spending limits. A live demo at Cloudflare Connect showed a marketing agent executing nine payments across two merchants for a protein-bar campaign, with settlement handled by Coinbase, the Base layer-2 network, and BVNK via Mastercard's Global Money Platform. The system is built on the x402 protocol and uses signed payment vouchers to enable off-chain transactions at machine speed.