ARC · PROTOCOL MATRIX

Visa Trusted Agent Protocol and Mastercard Agent Pay

These are payment-side trust layers. A registered agent signs its requests so the merchant or its CDN can recognise a trusted agent, and pays with a tokenised card credential issued for the agent. They sit underneath checkout protocols such as UCP and ACP rather than replacing them.

Governed by: Visa Trusted Agent Protocol is published by Visa as open source. Mastercard Agent Pay is Mastercard's framework. Both build on Web Bot Auth (HTTP message signatures, RFC 9421).

Official source: Visa TAP on GitHub · Visa developer page · Mastercard Agent Pay

What ARC sees

Live: n = 3,309 stores with a completed HTTP check, latest as of 11 Oct 2026 (UTC). Live figures (n = 3,309) update hourly from saved checks. Downloads are the dated weekly snapshot 2026-10-09.r3, n = 3,308, so their counts can differ.

Declared

—

Not measured

Not visible from outside

Valid

—

Not measured

Not visible from outside

Usable

—

Not measured

Not visible from outside

Transacts

—

Not measured

Not visible from outside

What ARC checks

  • Nothing yet. ARC does not detect these.

What ARC can't check from outside

  • Signature verification happens at the merchant or CDN when a registered agent visits. ARC is not a registered agent, so it cannot see whether a store accepts them.
  • Agentic token acceptance happens inside the card network.

Methodology

Counts use each store's latest completed HTTP check saved by ARC. Failed checks are left out of the denominator. Each host counts once.

Measured means ARC observed it directly. Inferred means ARC links two observations that do not prove each other. Not measured means ARC has no saved evidence, and the count is not zero adoption.

A checkout link means a cart was created for one real product. It is not a completed purchase. ARC never places orders.

The sample is ARC's curated store list plus stores people checked. It is not all of e-commerce. Treat percentages as rates in this sample.

Reads make no store requests and no model calls.

Cite this

ARC Protocol Matrix: Agent payments, arcreport.ai/protocols/payments, accessed 2026-10-11. Licensed CC-BY-4.0. Data: arcreport.ai/data.

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