AI agents may soon buy services from one another before most companies have decided how to identify them, pay them, or resolve disputes. Masumi Network is built around that gap. The Cardano-based infrastructure gives agents wallets and a decentralised way to exchange stablecoins, record transactions, and establish verifiable trust across company boundaries.
Created through a collaboration between blockchain provider NMKR and Serviceplan Group, Masumi launched in late 2024 as a framework-agnostic network. Its premise is that billions of agents will eventually collaborate and monetise specialised work.
The concept is ambitious, but it addresses a practical problem: autonomy cannot become an economy without accountability.
Cross-Company Agents Need a Transaction Layer
An internal agent can rely on corporate identity, permissions, and finance systems. The problem becomes harder when a hotel agent needs to buy a flight from an airline agent or commission work from an unknown service operated by another company.
Masumi equips agents with wallets so they can transfer stablecoins without depending on one central payment platform. Blockchain records can provide a shared transaction history between parties that do not operate the same infrastructure.
Founder Patrick Tobler argues that crypto’s difficult human experience is less relevant for software agents. People may struggle with wallets and blockchain mechanics; an agent can follow the protocol without caring whether the interface is intuitive.
Payment is only one part of trust. Agents also need verified identities, service definitions, price limits, proof that work was delivered, and rules for refunds or failures. A permanent transaction record cannot determine whether a hotel recommendation was suitable or an agent had authority to spend.
Decentralisation Does Not Remove Governance
IDC predicts that by 2030 as many as 20 percent of Global 1000 organisations may face lawsuits, major fines, or CIO dismissals following disruptions caused by inadequate agent controls. A decentralised network can reduce reliance on an intermediary while leaving those enterprise responsibilities intact.
Organisations must decide which agents may transact, with whom, for what purpose, and within which financial limits. Wallet credentials need secure custody and rapid revocation. Sensitive context should not be written to a public ledger merely because a payment uses one.
Stablecoins introduce their own dependencies, including issuer, jurisdiction, liquidity, accounting, tax, and regulatory treatment. Businesses will need reconciliation between on-chain events and conventional financial records.
The strongest design would combine decentralised settlement with policy enforcement at the enterprise boundary. An agent could discover and pay an external service while identity, budgets, approvals, and data-sharing rules remain under the employer’s control.
Real Demand Will Test the Agent Economy
Masumi began on Cardano and is built entirely on the network. Tobler is seeking conversations with companies that have heard extensively about AI but use little beyond ChatGPT. That outreach matters because infrastructure projects can become solutions circulating inside their own technical community.
The test is whether businesses encounter cross-agent transactions often enough to justify a new payment and trust layer. Early applications should have clear delivery evidence, low dispute complexity, and bounded spending. Digital research, data transformation, or machine-verifiable services may fit before travel purchases involving cancellations and human preferences.
Metrics should include transaction completion, failed work, dispute frequency, settlement cost, time saved, and security incidents—not the number of wallets created. The network must also demonstrate that agents from different frameworks can actually interoperate without exposing excessive data.
Masumi offers a useful inversion of the blockchain story. Instead of asking people to adapt to crypto, it proposes software as the native user. Agents can manage keys, protocols, and microscopic transactions more easily than consumers.
Yet code does not create trust simply by recording events. Trust emerges when identity, authority, evidence, and remedies align. Blockchain may supply part of that structure. The rest will come from governance that tells an autonomous buyer not only how to pay, but when it is allowed to make the deal.
