Rain Launches the Agentic Payments Alliance to Guide the Future of Agent-Driven Commerce

BitcoinWorld

Rain Launches the Agentic Payments Alliance to Guide the Future of Agent-Driven Commerce

Over 25 industry leaders, including Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, Circle, Solana, and Remitly, join to define the future of agentic commerce

NEW YORK, Aug. 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ – Rain, the enterprise-grade infrastructure for stablecoin-powered payments, today announced the launch of the Agentic Payments Alliance (APA), a coalition of organizations working together to help guide the development of agentic commerce. Founding members include Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, Circle, Solana, and Remitly.

By 2030, McKinsey projects between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global agentic commerce. Much of the infrastructure that activity will depend on, including how agents get authorized, how fraud gets caught, and how loyalty and rewards travel with an agent, is still being defined. The APA was formed to bring the people building that infrastructure into the same conversation, before those decisions get made in isolation.

Rain has spent the past year building toward this moment, including its Agent Control Layer and Scoped Cards, which give agents widely accepted payment credentials that are safe and limited. That work put Rain in a position to convene founding members across the industry rather than build the category alone.

The Alliance itself is a working coalition, run collectively by its founding members rather than owned by any one company. Members will set its charter and mission together. Early work is expected to include shared research and frameworks, testing emerging standards for agent identity and authorization, and advocacy on the regulatory questions agentic commerce raises.

Founding members will also get early access to Rain’s Agentic Startup Program, an accelerator supporting early-stage companies building for agentic commerce. The program’s first cohort of five startups will present at a demo day open to Alliance members, giving founding organizations a direct look at the applications and use cases shaping this category.

“The risk in a moment like this is not that the industry moves too slowly – it’s that innovation outpaces alignment,” said Sherri Haymond, executive vice president and global head of Digital Commercialization at Mastercard. “For decades, Mastercard has helped shape the standards that enable commerce at scale, and our participation in the Agentic Payments Alliance is a natural extension of that work for the agentic era.”

“No single company should get to decide how agents transact on someone’s behalf. That has to come from the platforms building the rails, the regulators setting the rules, and the innovators closest to how agents are actually being used today,” said Farooq Malik, co-founder and CEO of Rain. “We initiated the Agentic Payments Alliance to put all of these parties in the same room, and to do it now, while the category is still taking shape.”

Founding Members

The Agentic Payments Alliance’s founding coalition includes: Avalanche, Basis Theory, Chainalysis, Circle, Coinflow, Crossmint, delta Network, Episode Six, Evertec, Fireblocks, Fiserv, Kala, Lithic, Mastercard, Monad, PayOS, Rain, Remitly, Rialo by Subzero Labs, Sardine, Shift4, Solana, Turnkey, Uniswap Labs, Visa, and Yuno.

How to Join

Organizations across payments, financial services, technology, and policy interested in joining the Agentic Payments Alliance can reach out at apa@rain.xyz.

About Rain

Rain is the global stablecoin payments platform for enterprises, neobanks, platforms, developers, and AI agents. Our technology allows partners to move, store, and use stablecoins instantly and compliantly through global payment cards, rewards, on/offramps, stablecoin and fiat wallets, and cross-border rails. As both a Visa and Mastercard Principal Member, Rain issues cards that work at more than 175 million merchant locations in over 200 countries and territories. Built natively for stablecoins and trusted by more than 100 organizations worldwide, Rain delivers secure, scalable infrastructure that makes money move freely and instantly around the world. Learn more at https://www.rain.xyz/.

Media Contact:
Lucas Piazza
Marketing Lead, Rain
lucas@rain.xyz

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rain-launches-the-agentic-payments-alliance-to-guide-the-future-of-agent-driven-commerce-302853532.html

SOURCE Rain

This post Rain Launches the Agentic Payments Alliance to Guide the Future of Agent-Driven Commerce first appeared on BitcoinWorld.