AI agents can already recommend products and plan tasks, but most remain unable to complete a payment on their own. The gap between recommending and transacting in the emerging "agentic economy" requires new payment infrastructure to close—and XDC Network believes it has built the solution.

XDC Network's XDC AI product pairs the open x402 standard with "gasless" USDC settlement, enabling AI agents to pay for services on a per-request basis without the need for accounts or human approval. USDC, issued by Circle and among the largest USD-pegged stablecoins by market capitalization, provides a digital dollar settlement asset that can move globally in seconds—properties that make it well-suited for machine-to-machine micropayments. The company recently demonstrated the marketplace at its New York office, an event that co-founder Atul Khekade said drew more than 100 industry representatives.

Today's AI assistants can plan trips, draft emails, and locate a nearby coffee shop. What most still cannot do is purchase the coffee. That inability to move from recommendation to action is the missing piece of the "agentic economy," a model in which AI agents act on behalf of users to book services, pay for data, and settle transactions. For this to function, agents need a payment mechanism that is instant, programmable, and trusted.

Although AI companies have raised tens of billions of dollars, much of what they have built resides in what the industry calls a "knowledge layer"—systems that generate recommendations rather than execute actions.

"They're not actually doing actions for you, and that's for a reason," Khekade said in a recent FintechTV interview, citing the absence of "real-time settlement… compliance, dispute resolution, KYC, AML, and that exact trust layer which AI needs." Companies ranging from card networks to crypto startups are now racing to close that gap.

The x402 Standard

One key building block has emerged from that effort: x402, an open payment standard introduced by Coinbase in 2025 that revives the HTTP "402 Payment Required" status code—a code reserved since the 1990s but never utilized.

In an x402 exchange, a server can charge for an API call or a piece of data, and a client—including an autonomous AI agent—can settle the payment in stablecoins over the same request, with no account, API key, or human sign-off required.

XDC Network is among the platforms building on the standard. XDC AI pairs x402 with "gasless" USDC settlement, meaning users do not pay network fees directly, allowing AI agents to pay per request.

That combination, said co-founder Ritesh Kakkad in a LinkedIn post, is "building the actual rails" for agentic commerce, enabling AI agents to "autonomously pay per API call, book services, and settle trades in real-time at sub-cent fees."

Inside XDC AI

XDC AI is designed as shared infrastructure for agent payments. Rather than every business constructing its own payment rails, the company says developers can plug into a common marketplace. In Khekade's view, that could allow "coffee shops or DoorDash or travel companies" to build "agentic applications" on the network.

XDC Network is no newcomer to institutional infrastructure. Launched in 2019 by XinFin and co-founded by Khekade and Kakkad, the EVM-compatible Layer-1 is aligned with ISO 20022—the messaging standard used across traditional banking and increasingly adopted by major payment rails including SWIFT and Fedwire—and has focused on trade finance, payments, and real-world asset tokenization.

XDC Tech, the U.S.-based institutional arm of XDC Network, has integrated Bridge, a Stripe company, bringing stablecoin settlement into its agentic AI roadmap. Stripe acquired Bridge in 2024 to expand its stablecoin capabilities, giving XDC access to payment infrastructure that already connects with the broader digital-asset ecosystem. XDC describes the partnership as a foundational element of its plan to become the settlement layer for the agentic economy—a future in which AI agents transact with other agents, businesses, and humans at machine speed. By plugging into infrastructure Bridge already operates, XDC is taking a faster path toward that vision than building it alone.

"Every layer of finance is being rebuilt for a world where software, not just people, initiates the payment," Khekade said. "This partnership gives our ecosystem stablecoin infrastructure that already meets that bar."

The company recently showcased its XDC AI marketplace at its New York office in a demonstration that drew more than 100 industry representatives from leading banks, tech partners, venture capital firms, family offices, AI technology companies, and ecosystem builders, who are "very excited to see what we are building right now," Khekade said.

AI agents are becoming economic agents.

At XDC Tech's New York office, @atulkhekade demonstrated XDC AI—a framework combining agentic AI, gasless USDC payments and XDC Network settlement.

What's XDC AI: #XDCAI #XDCNetwork #AgenticCommerce

— XDC Ritesh Kakkad (@riteshkakkad) July 25, 2026

The event demonstrated how agentic finance has become the "key translation point for AI to really transact and operate," Khekade said, adding that with XDC AI, "You can order a coffee. You can book your tickets."

Connected through XDC AI's MCP connector API in an assistant's settings, a chatbot that could once only point users to a coffee shop "will actually do that transaction for you," Khekade said. That capability, he added, is "quite transformative in a way, considering that they lack that kind of monetization layer right now."

Khekade cast compliance and risk controls as central to the system, arguing that autonomous software needs "a risk compliance and spending limits layer" to operate safely. XDC has "already built it and perfected it," he said, with the network acting as a "cushion" for mainstream systems bridging AI compute and the ability to transact.

The Road Ahead

Agent-driven payments still have a way to go before they become as routine as tapping a payment card, with nascent standards and the industry still working through questions of security, privacy, and control. But both traditional finance and crypto builders are already constructing infrastructure for a future in which agents transact autonomously.

Kakkad is betting that the "convergence of AI agents, stablecoins, and enterprise blockchain," particularly in trade finance and real-world asset tokenization, will "unlock massive value."