{
  "audience": "Payments professionals. Definitions are written at professional register; they are not consumer simplifications.",
  "note": "Professional glossary for agentwillpay.com. Definitions are written at professional register; they are not consumer simplifications. Where a term has an institutional owner, the definition follows that institution’s public statements and carries a source link. Generic industry terms carry no single-owner source link and are marked as such.",
  "terms": [
    {
      "definition": "A pre-authored, cryptographically signed authorization record that scopes what an agent may do, for how much, and for how long. In AP2, each purchase is represented by mandates — an Intent Mandate (what the agent may do), a Cart Mandate (the exact items and price), and a Payment Mandate (the signal to the network that an agent is involved); AP2 v0.2 restates these as Checkout and Payment Mandates in open and closed stages. A mandate proves authorization; it does not by itself move money.",
      "source": "https://www.meshpay.com/blog/agentic-payment-protocols-compared",
      "status": "verified",
      "term": "mandate"
    },
    {
      "definition": "A tamper-evident digital credential in which an issuer cryptographically signs claims about a subject, a holder stores and presents it, and a verifier checks the signature — and the credential's status — without contacting the issuer in real time. In agent payments, mandates are issued as verifiable credentials so that authorization evidence travels with the transaction and can be checked by any party in the chain. The model is defined by the W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model (v2.0 is the current Recommendation).",
      "source": "https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model-2.0/",
      "status": "verified",
      "term": "verifiable credential"
    },
    {
      "definition": "The trust signal attached to a tokenized credential, indicating how strongly the token requestor and cardholder were authenticated when the token was provisioned and how the token has behaved over its lifecycle. Issuers and networks use the signal in authorization decisions: a token backed by strong authentication carries more assurance than one provisioned with weak or no authentication. Visa describes the signal as evaluated throughout the token's lifecycle, based on provisioning and behavioral history.",
      "source": "https://www.visa.com.hk/en_HK/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases/visa-announces-new-ai-stablecoin-and-token-innovations-powering-the-next-phase-of-digital-commerce.html",
      "status": "verified",
      "term": "token assurance"
    },
    {
      "definition": "A Visa tool, created with New Generation, that lets a merchant evaluate its own website for agentic commerce readiness — specifically, whether AI agents can navigate, understand, and complete tasks on that site. It scores the merchant's site, not the trustworthiness of any agent; it is a readiness check for the seller side, not an authorization decision.",
      "source": "https://www.visa.com.hk/en_HK/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases/visa-announces-new-ai-stablecoin-and-token-innovations-powering-the-next-phase-of-digital-commerce.html",
      "status": "verified",
      "term": "Agent Score"
    },
    {
      "definition": "Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, under which an agent registers with Visa, receives cryptographic credentials, and signs each purchase request so the receiving side can verify the agent against Visa's registry. TAP establishes that the agent is a registered, recognized actor; it does not by itself grant spend authority — what the agent may spend is set separately by the buyer's approved instructions. In the Visa–BILL–Billtrust pilot, the BILL Payment Agent is registered through TAP and the Agentic Directory, and the supplier side recognizes it through the same protocol.",
      "source": "https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.releaseId.22856.html",
      "status": "verified",
      "term": "TAP"
    },
    {
      "definition": "The Machine Payments Protocol, an open protocol for machine-to-machine payments over HTTP, launched by Stripe and Tempo on 18 March 2026. It formalizes the HTTP 402 Payment Required flow with standard WWW-Authenticate and Authorization headers and an IETF draft (draft-ryan-httpauth-payment-01), and it is backward-compatible with x402. Its distinguishing primitive is the session: an agent authorizes a spending limit once and then streams many small payments within it, settling in stablecoins on Tempo, by card through Stripe and Visa, or in bitcoin over Lightning.",
      "source": "https://www.meshpay.com/blog/agentic-payment-protocols-compared",
      "status": "verified",
      "term": "MPP"
    },
    {
      "definition": "The Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open commerce-layer protocol from OpenAI and Stripe, released 29 September 2025 under the Apache 2.0 license and still in beta. It defines how an agent and a merchant exchange the steps of a purchase — product feed, checkout session, order confirmation, and a narrowly scoped delegated payment token (Stripe's Shared Payment Token is the first implementation) — while the merchant charges through its existing payment provider and remains the merchant of record. ACP covers the commerce flow; authorization proof and settlement belong to adjacent layers.",
      "source": "https://www.meshpay.com/blog/agentic-payment-protocols-compared",
      "status": "verified",
      "term": "ACP"
    },
    {
      "definition": "Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, an open commerce standard announced in January 2026 and co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart, covering the full journey from catalog search and cart building through checkout, identity linking, and order management. It runs over REST and JSON-RPC, interoperates with MCP, A2A, and AP2 for payment authorization, and leaves the merchant as merchant of record. UCP-powered checkout went live in US Search and the Gemini app on 15 October 2026.",
      "source": "https://www.bigcommerce.co.uk/articles/ecommerce/agentic-checkout/",
      "status": "verified",
      "term": "UCP"
    },
    {
      "definition": "An open payment protocol created by Coinbase that revives the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code for machine-native payments: a server answers an unpaid request with a 402 carrying price, recipient, and accepted assets, the client signs and retries with the payment proof in an X-PAYMENT header, and a facilitator verifies and settles on-chain, typically in USDC on Base. No account, subscription, or API key is required. Version 2 shipped in December 2025, and stewardship moved to the x402 Foundation under the Linux Foundation in July 2026.",
      "source": "https://www.concordium.com/article/x402-explained-agentic-payments-identity",
      "status": "verified",
      "term": "x402"
    },
    {
      "definition": "Google's Agent Payments Protocol for proving that a buyer authorized an agent's transaction, announced 16 September 2025 with 60+ payments and technology organizations and donated to the FIDO Alliance with v0.2 in April 2026. Each purchase is represented by cryptographically signed mandates — an Intent Mandate (what the agent may do), a Cart Mandate (the exact items and price), and a Payment Mandate (the signal to the network that an agent is involved); v0.2 restates these as Checkout and Payment Mandates in open and closed stages, and adds Human Not Present payments and Verifiable Intent, a tamper-proof log of user-authorized agent actions co-developed with Mastercard. AP2 authorizes; it does not settle — processing belongs to payment processors — and it is method-agnostic, covering cards today with real-time bank transfers and digital currencies on the roadmap.",
      "source": "https://www.meshpay.com/blog/agentic-payment-protocols-compared",
      "status": "verified",
      "term": "AP2"
    },
    {
      "definition": "Settlement of a payment obligation in a fiat-pegged crypto asset — typically USDC — with finality recorded on the settlement blockchain rather than through correspondent banking or card clearing. In agent payments it is the settlement leg used by HTTP-native rails such as x402 (on Base) and MPP (on Tempo), where the facilitator or protocol verifies the signed payment and the ledger records the transfer. Settlement in stablecoins does not by itself prove authorization; the authorization evidence (mandate, voucher, or token) travels separately.",
      "note": "Generic industry term; no single institutional owner.",
      "source": null,
      "status": "verified",
      "term": "stablecoin settlement"
    },
    {
      "definition": "A cardholder's dispute of a transaction, raised through the issuer under the card scheme's rules. If the dispute is upheld, the transaction amount is reversed to the cardholder and the merchant, via its acquirer, bears the loss plus a scheme-defined fee. In agent payments, the mandate chain and intent records become the authorization evidence the merchant and acquirer rely on to defend the transaction.",
      "note": "Generic card-scheme mechanism; rules are set per scheme, not by a single institution.",
      "source": null,
      "status": "verified",
      "term": "chargeback"
    },
    {
      "definition": "Visa's Agentic Directory, a registry of agents and merchants verified by Visa as legitimate participants in agentic commerce. Merchants use it to verify which AI agents can safely transact on their sites, and agents use it to confirm they are interacting with legitimate businesses; only Visa-verified participants are listed. It is the lookup side of the Trusted Agent Protocol: TAP proves an agent's identity cryptographically, and the directory records which identities Visa has verified.",
      "source": "https://www.visa.com.hk/en_HK/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases/visa-announces-new-ai-stablecoin-and-token-innovations-powering-the-next-phase-of-digital-commerce.html",
      "status": "verified",
      "term": "agentic directory"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Agent Will Pay — professional glossary (draft)"
}