Three Months of AI Agents on Your Credit Card: From Zero to Millions per Week
Payment credentials upgraded agents from 'recommending you buy' to 'buying for you'; token vaults like VGS scaled from single-user to multi-user access, and a new agentic token standard hit millions of weekly transactions in three months, starting from zero.
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Payment credentials are an agent's hands and feet
In the past three months, agents shifted from bystander to actor—the pivot point is access to payment credentials. Once an agent can safely hold a credit-card token, it stops just recommending you buy flowers and actually places orders for you or books piano teachers. This directly triggered the 'wallet wars,' with every wallet racing to connect to agents.
— Terry AngelosVGS holds the card details of one-third of e-commerce
VGS is a token vault securing about one-third of global e-commerce GMV's payment data; the largest online merchants, newest banks, and leading AI labs all use it. Merchants don't want to touch user card numbers directly or get locked into a single payment processor—a $1 billion GMV merchant uses an average of 3–5 processors. VGS acts as the unified credential hub and token refresh service behind them.
— Terry AngelosEvery wallet is racing to connect to agents
For agents to be useful, they need a wallet with the broadest consumer reach and merchant coverage. Stripe Link has roughly 300 million consumers and 1 million merchants; ShopPay about 1.7 million merchants; PayPal over 400 million accounts and roughly 30 million merchants. This scramble is called the 'wallet wars'—the same logic as Visa and PayPal fighting over the 'default card' slot in mobile wallets a decade ago, except now they're fighting over the agent's default gateway.
— Terry AngelosStripe is like AOL in the proxy-commerce era
Stripe Link helped a user buy a chandelier from Walmart, but because Link has no direct Walmart connection, Stripe had to issue its own disposable virtual card and then collect from the user. The transaction went through, but when problems surfaced and the user called their card issuer, the bank only saw a Stripe charge—couldn't trace it to Walmart. The call eventually reached a Stripe engineer's personal phone because Stripe had built no chargeback support.
— Terry AngelosNew token standard went from zero to millions in three months
An open agentic standard solved Stripe's disposable-card mess: an agent declares ‘I'm a verified agent, max spend $100’ and receives a new 16-digit token tied to the user's real Visa card. When merchants process it, they're charging the real card; chargebacks and subscription upgrades follow the old rules. This token type was nonexistent three months ago; VGS now issues millions per week.
— Terry AngelosNo solution yet for whether an agent is acting in its right mind
Transaction validation traditionally has three checks: Is the card real? Is the holder present? Is the holder in their right mind to decide this (in a casino, drunk people shouldn't be able to charge)? Agents pass the first two; the third—whether an agent misunderstood the user's instruction or hallucinated—lacks clear accountability. There are real cases of users asking ‘Why did you spend $900?’
— Terry AngelosAmazon locks out agents; Walmart opens the door
Amazon recently blocked agents like Muse—the core reason is that ads pay better than pure sales. Agents give Amazon no eyeballs to sell. This isn't just Luddites opposing change; Amazon has real financial incentives against agents. Conversely, retail giants like Walmart might embrace them because of strong last-mile delivery; small merchants in the Shopify ecosystem have little choice and must treat agents as a new channel.
— Alex RampellUnderestimated: the consumption that agents will unlock
Neither expects agents to trigger panic withdrawals from savings accounts—cross-bank transfers still have friction. What's truly underestimated is pent-up demand—purchases that *should* happen but procrastination blocks. A friend recommends safer bike tires in the cycling chat; you mean to buy them but two years pass. If an agent is listening, that demand keeps surfacing and converts to actual spending.
— Terry AngelosCredit-card rewards programs are vulnerable to agents
Credit-card rewards rest on asymmetry: you pick a card for certain purchases, then casually use it elsewhere. Once agents unified all your transactions and always picked the card with the highest return for each purchase, that ecosystem collapses—it relied on you *not* optimizing. Terms and rules would have to be rewritten.
— Alex RampellIn their own words · checked verbatim
In the last three months, we've had this huge leap from agents being what I would call spectators to agents being actors because they effectively have arms and legs, which are payment credentials.
Terry Angelos0:00
So we sort of have kicked off what I kind of call the wallet wars, where every wallet is now rushing to connect to the agents.
Terry Angelos0:00
Link has my card, but it can't just give my card over to the agent and over to Walmart.
Terry Angelos20:55
if you've had 15 drinks and you can't even speak properly, they're probably going to not let you pay.
Terry Angelos31:47
But I kind of think of it as, you can either be antagonistic to agentic commerce, or you can be highly receptive to agentic commerce.
Alex Rampell36:00
If my agent was in that group chat, I would be buying tires every time Seth makes a new recommendation.
Terry Angelos43:06
And if agents are intermediating all of our transactions, and I'm only getting points on the card that gets me, I'm only using the card where I get points, the whole points reward ecosystem falls apart.
Alex Rampell46:16
Figures
| VGS-managed e-commerce GMV | roughly one-third | 3:07 |
| Shopify ShopPay merchants | roughly 1.7 million | 13:39 |
| PayPal coverage | over 400 million accounts, roughly 30 million merchants | 14:41 |
| $1B GMV merchant processors | 3–5 | 8:14 |
| Annual card replacement rate | roughly one-third (25% due to expiration) | 8:14 |
| VGS-held card credentials | roughly 10 billion | 27:34 |
| Weekly agentic tokens | zero three months ago, now millions per week | 26:34 |
Glossary
- VGS
- Third-party token vault that securely holds credit cards and other payment credentials for merchants
- PAN
- The 16-digit number on the front of a credit card; the card's original account number
- network token
- A substitute card number issued by Visa or Mastercard, bound to a specific merchant domain, and more secure than a plain card number
- PCI DSS
- A hundred-page compliance framework that merchants must follow when handling credit-card data
- agentic token
- A new payment token designed for AI agent proxy spending: amount-limited and tied to the real cardholder
- chargeback
- A cardholder's refund dispute mechanism for challenging a suspicious or problematic transaction with the card issuer
How to listen
Payment infrastructure builders, digital wallet operators, AI agent commercialization practitioners, and investors trying to understand the battle over who holds AI's credit cards.
Skip the opening where the two hosts reminisce and recall 2006 startup stories—won't affect understanding of the payment infrastructure content that follows.