Agentic Commerce Timeline

The key milestones in agentic commerce, in order, each tied to a primary source. This page is maintained as new developments land. For a forward-looking counterpart, when this is likely to become unavoidable, see when agentic commerce becomes table stakes.

2025

29 April: Mastercard unveils Agent Pay, its agentic payments program built on agentic tokens, with launch partners including Microsoft and IBM.

30 April: Visa announces Intelligent Commerce, opening its network to AI agents through tokenized “AI-Ready Cards,” with collaborators including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Stripe.

6 May: Coinbase launches x402, an open protocol that revives the HTTP “402 Payment Required” status for stablecoin payments between software.

14 May: Perplexity selects PayPal to power agentic checkout in Perplexity Pro, one of the earliest named agent-checkout partnerships.

16 September: Google announces the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), a payment-authorization standard backed by more than 60 organizations. PayPal announces AP2 support the same day.

23 September: Coinbase and Cloudflare announce their intent to form the x402 Foundation to steward the stablecoin protocol as a neutral standard.

29 September: OpenAI and Stripe launch Instant Checkout in ChatGPT and release the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), with Etsy live first.

14 October: Walmart partners with OpenAI to let ChatGPT users buy its catalog.

28 October: PayPal adopts ACP, bringing its merchant network and wallet into ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout.

9 December: Anthropic donates the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to a new foundation under the Linux Foundation, cementing MCP as the neutral discovery layer beneath the stack.

2026

11 January: Google launches the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) at the NRF retail show, co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart, covering the full shopping journey.

18 March: Stripe and Tempo launch the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), an open standard for agents to pay services programmatically, for microtransactions and recurring payments, with payment supported in stablecoins as well as cards. It joins x402 in the machine-to-machine settlement lane.

March (reported): OpenAI scales back native Instant Checkout, shifting toward ChatGPT Apps and product discovery. This was surfaced through trade reporting and an OpenAI spokesperson statement rather than a single official release.

2 April: The x402 Foundation formally launches under the Linux Foundation, with Coinbase contributing the protocol.

8 April: Visa unveils Intelligent Commerce Connect, a network, protocol, and token-vault-agnostic “on ramp” that lets merchants accept agent-initiated payments across protocols including the Trusted Agent Protocol, MPP, ACP, and UCP, launching in pilot with general availability targeted for the end of June 2026.

14 April: American Express debuts its Agentic Commerce Experiences developer kit and an industry-first Agent Purchase Protection pledge for purchases made by registered agents.

24 April: Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe join the UCP Tech Council, doubling it to ten members alongside founders Google, Shopify, Etsy, Target, and Wayfair, a sign the industry is converging on UCP as a shared open standard.

April: Google donates AP2 to the FIDO Alliance and releases AP2 v0.2, adding support for autonomous “human not present” payments. Mastercard’s compatible Verifiable Intent standard is contributed to FIDO alongside it.

20 May: At Google Marketing Live, Google expands UCP, extending Universal Cart to named brands (Nike, Sephora, Target, Walmart, Wayfair, and Shopify merchants) and pushing UCP into new verticals beyond retail, hotel booking and food delivery, rolling out in the US first.

What to watch

The trajectory is clear: a land-grab phase of competing vendor announcements in 2025, followed in 2026 by consolidation into neutral standards bodies (the FIDO Alliance and the Linux Foundation) and a settling-out between the two commerce-layer camps, ACP and UCP. For how the pieces relate, see the landscape and the protocol stack.