AI agents can pay and hire autonomously, but a trading standard is still missing

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Circle published its Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) specification on June 23, enabling AI agents to make USDC payments via HTTP 402 flows without API keys, while ERC-8183 introduced an on-chain escrow-and-evaluator framework for agents to hire other agents. BNB Chain has already shipped a live SDK implementing the hiring standard, and the payments lane is crowded with competing solutions from Google, Stripe, and Mastercard. Together, these two standards cover two of the three core verbs of machine commerce — paying and hiring — within just a few months. However, no equivalent specification exists for agent-to-agent trading, where two parties exchange assets simultaneously and the key risk is ensuring neither side can default after the other has committed. Unlike payments or hires, trades are objective and two-sided, making the absence of a dedicated atomic-swap standard a notable gap as autonomous agent commerce scales.

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