The Davos Question Nobody Asked: Who’s Building the Wallet for AI?

The plumbing is being built

While Davos debated AI ethics and regulation, a handful of companies were quietly building the infrastructure that makes autonomous AI actually functional.

x402: Payments baked into the internet itself

In September 2025, Coinbase and Cloudflare announced the x402 Foundation. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re not alone. But it might be the most important protocol you’ll encounter in the next five years.

Here’s the idea: there’s an HTTP status code—402—that’s existed since the early days of the web. It means “Payment Required.” It was never implemented. Nobody built the standard for how a server should ask for money, or how a client should pay.

x402 fixes that. It embeds payments directly into web requests. An AI agent hits a paywall, receives payment instructions, sends a stablecoin transaction, and gets access—all in one HTTP exchange. No subscriptions. No API keys. No human clicking “confirm purchase.”

The use cases write themselves. An AI assistant that buys accessories from multiple merchants for your Halloween costume. An agent that pays per browser rendering session instead of committing to monthly SaaS fees. An autonomous trader making micropayments for real-time data feeds.

Transactions on the x402 protocol increased twentyfold in a single month after launch. The momentum is real.

Coinbase Payments MCP

In October 2025, Coinbase launched Payments MCP, a system that lets large language models, including Claude and Gemini, access blockchain wallets and transact in crypto.

The pitch from Coinbase’s team: “Stablecoins move at the speed of code, integrate seamlessly with APIs, and enable autonomous agents to act without human friction.”

This is what it looks like when major infrastructure players take agentic commerce seriously. Not a pilot program. Not a whitepaper. Working rails.

Know Your Agent (KYA)

If agents are going to transact, someone needs to verify them. Enter KYA—Know Your Agent—the emerging framework for AI identity.

Think of it like KYC for robots. Instead of verifying a human with a passport and a utility bill, KYA establishes an agent’s identity, capabilities, permissions, and the human or organization behind it.

Worldpay announced it will use KYA to help merchants verify AI agents at checkout. That’s not a startup experiment. That’s a major payment processor saying: agents are coming, and we need to know who they are before they swipe.

The technical layer involves decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials, and reputation systems that track agent behavior over time. It’s early, but it’s not theoretical.

The stablecoin moment

Why stablecoins? Why not just give agents credit cards?

Because traditional payment rails weren’t built for this.

Credit card transactions cost 2-3% plus fixed fees. For a $500 purchase, that’s fine. For a thousand micropayments of $0.10, it’s economically insane. The fixed fee alone—often $0.15 to $0.30—makes small transactions impossible.

Stablecoins on modern blockchains settle in under 500 milliseconds for less than a tenth of a cent. That’s not a marginal improvement. That’s a different category of capability.

And the scale is already there. Stablecoin transaction volumes hit $33 trillion in 2025—up 72% from the prior year. 90% of surveyed banks and fintech companies are actively integrating stablecoin capabilities. This isn’t crypto-native speculation anymore. It’s infrastructure.

The agents need rails that move at their speed. Traditional finance doesn’t. Stablecoins do.

Bermuda said “fuck it, we’ll go first”

While the US debates stablecoin legislation and the EU refines AI Act implementation timelines, a tiny island in the Atlantic decided to run the experiment.

At Davos, Bermuda announced plans to become the world’s first fully onchain national economy. Circle and Coinbase are providing the infrastructure. Government agencies will pilot stablecoin-based payments. Local banks are integrating tokenization tools. Businesses are getting digital wallets.

This isn’t new for Bermuda. Back in 2018, they passed the Digital Asset Business Act—the first comprehensive digital asset framework anywhere. Circle and Coinbase were among the first firms licensed.

At the Bermuda Digital Finance Forum last year, they tested real-world adoption with a USDC airdrop: every attendee got 100 USDC to spend at local merchants. Not a hackathon demo. Actual commerce.

Why Bermuda? Because traditional payment rails punish them. Island jurisdictions get lumped with Caribbean territories by processors, driving up fees and squeezing merchant margins. For a small, entrepreneurial economy, those costs matter.

Onchain rails fix that. Faster settlement. Lower fees. Direct access to global finance.

The population is 65,000 people. They’re building what the G7 is still arguing about.

The regulatory mess

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.

The EU AI Act is the most comprehensive AI regulatory framework in the world. It entered force in August 2024, with various provisions rolling out through 2027. It addresses risk tiers, transparency requirements, prohibited practices.

But it wasn’t designed with agents in mind.

Researchers at The Future Society published a report in late 2025: “Ahead of the Curve: Governing AI Agents under the EU AI Act.” Their conclusion? The Act does apply to agents, but gaps remain. Agent-specific risks need additional guidelines. Technical standards need updates.

Meanwhile, the US approach is fragmented at best. The White House’s December 2025 executive order aims for a “minimally burdensome national standard” that limits state-level divergence. Translation: innovation first, figure out the rules later.

The fundamental problem is deeper than any single regulation: AI agents aren’t legal persons. They can’t open bank accounts. They can’t hold assets in their own name. When an agent executes a financial transaction, who’s liable? The user who deployed it? The company that built it? The platform it runs on?

Nobody knows. The frameworks don’t exist yet.

And agents don’t care about jurisdictions. They operate globally by default, at machine speed, 24/7. The regulatory infrastructure is playing catch-up to technology that doesn’t wait.

The question Davos didn’t ask

Davos 2026 had plenty of AI sessions. The ECB Governor shared a stage with Brian Armstrong and Brad Garlinghouse. The conversation shifted from “should crypto exist” to “how fast can we integrate.”

But the real question isn’t about integration. It’s about infrastructure.

AI agents are here. They’re managing schedules, executing trades, coordinating logistics. They’ll be buying groceries, booking travel, settling invoices. They’ll transact billions—maybe trillions—in value.

And right now, they can’t pay for a cup of coffee.

The companies building wallets for AI aren’t chasing hype. They’re building the plumbing for an economy that doesn’t exist yet—but will, faster than most people expect.

Bermuda’s already in. Coinbase and Cloudflare are setting standards. Payment processors are developing agent verification.

The infrastructure is being built. The question is whether you’re paying attention.