Mastercard has joined forces with Lobstercash and Crossmint to enable AI agents to complete payments through existing credit and debit cards on their owners’ behalf. 

The integration merges Mastercard Agent Pay with Verifiable Intent, extending network-backed payments and standards-based proof of authorization into the rapidly growing AI agent economy.

Announced in an April 17 blog post, Mastercard holders using OpenClaw can now authorize AI agents to shop on their behalf without registering a new wallet or requesting a fresh card. 

“Bringing it to lobster.cash means agent users don’t need a new wallet or a new card,” said Alfonso Gómez-Jordana Mañas, Co-Founder of Crossmint.

Read: Crypto Market Report Q1 2026: BTC, ETH, Stablecoins, RWAs, AI and Institutional Trends

How the Crossmint and Mastercard Integration Actually Works

The Crossmint SDK handles everything for lobster. cash, securely storing and routing payment credentials across the agentic stack via Basis Theory, so agents transact without credentials ever leaving the vault. Reflecting broader industry movement toward secure AI-agent payments such as Mastercard’s move to acquire BVNK and expand into AI payments and stablecoin infrastructure.

BIG NEWS: Your AI agents will soon be able to pay with your existing @Mastercard via lobstercash.

Your card. Your agents. Your rules.

Powered by Crossmint.

🧵 pic.twitter.com/GZHLP8aUQR

— Crossmint (@crossmint) April 16, 2026

Meanwhile, lobster.cash already powers AI agent payments across leading platforms, including OpenClaw, Claude Code, Devin, Hermes, and Zo Computer. 

Mastercard Agent Pay will first be available to OpenClaw agents via lobster.cash, with plans to expand to additional supported agentic platforms in subsequent rollout phases, according to reports.

Crossmint’s Alfonso Gómez added that “Users can put the card they already have to work for their agent, with the security and control they expect from Mastercard. This is how agentic payments reach everyone.”

Visit: Data on Crypto Payment Adoption

Agentic Payments Race Into Trillion-Dollar Territory

Beyond the Mastercard deal, Paolo D’Amico, Senior Product Engineer at Tools for Humanity, told Coingape that agentic payments are one trend quietly taking over the crypto industry.

 “Dinner reservations, concert tickets, travel bookings and other online shopping activities will get increasingly executed through agents,” he said.

Mastercard, Visa, Coinbase, Stripe, and Polygon are all racing to build agentic payment rails, while over 40,000 on-chain AI agents already transact. This trend is accelerating rapidly as agentic payments and AI-driven commerce expansion across crypto networks.

The rise of the x402 payments standard has also seen more than 100 million payments processed in just a few months, peaking at 3.3 million transactions worth $3 million within a single day.

McKinsey projects agentic commerce could reach $3 to $5 trillion in global B2C revenue by 2030, per a Nevermined report.

Circle says over 400,000 AI agents now have purchasing power, while ChatGPT alone processes 53 million shopping queries daily across its 2.5 billion prompts, fueling demand for the new rails.