Ant Digital Technologies, the blockchain division of Chinese fintech giant Ant Group, has launched Anvita, a new platform designed for an “agent-to-agent economy” where autonomous software programs transact on crypto rails with minimal human oversight. The move positions Ant against a growing field of competitors including Visa, Google, and Coinbase, all vying to build the core infrastructure for a market McKinsey projects could mediate $3 trillion to $5 trillion in commerce by 2030.
"Pure RWA is just the 'static infrastructure' of digital assets," Zhuoqun Bian, president of blockchain business at Ant Digital Technologies, said at the company's Real Up summit in Cannes where the platform was unveiled. "The real transformation lies in moving toward an onchain agentic economy, where autonomous agents will not just analyze data — they will hold assets, execute trades, and optimize portfolios."
Anvita debuts with two main products: Anvita TaaS (Tokenization-as-a-Service) for institutional real-world asset tokenization, and Anvita Flow, a platform where AI agents can register, discover each other, and settle payments in real time. The system uses the x402 protocol, co-developed by Coinbase, to allow agents to settle sub-cent transactions instantly using Circle's USDC stablecoin, bypassing traditional invoicing and subscriptions.
The launch comes as interest in agentic commerce intensifies, yet actual usage remains nascent. While the Solana network has reportedly processed over 15 million on-chain agent transactions, the underlying x402 protocol sees only about $28,000 in daily volume, with analysts flagging roughly half as artificial activity. Ant’s entry provides a major new competitor but also highlights the gap between the long-term vision and current adoption.
A Two-Pronged Strategy: Assets and Agents
Anvita’s structure separates the digitization of assets from the economy that will use them. The first component, Anvita TaaS, provides institutions with the tools for tokenizing real-world assets, complete with custody and treasury management. This creates the foundational layer of on-chain value that agents can later access.
The second component, Anvita Flow, is the coordination layer for the agents themselves. It functions as a decentralized marketplace where developers can list autonomous agents built on popular frameworks like OpenClaw and Claude Code. These agents can then discover one another, coordinate to complete complex tasks, and, crucially, pay each other for services rendered without human intervention. This creates a composable system where an agent could, for example, autonomously pull financial data from one paid service, use another agent to perform analysis, and execute a trade, settling each leg of the workflow with instant micropayments.
The Web3 Bet: Why Crypto Rails for AI Agents?
Ant’s decision to build on crypto rails centers on the unique demands of an agent economy, which traditional financial infrastructure is ill-equipped to handle. Legacy payment systems like credit cards were designed for human-to-business transactions and rely on manual inputs, account registrations, and human-centric fraud prevention like CAPTCHAs. These create bottlenecks for autonomous agents designed to operate 24/7 without intervention.
Protocols like x402, which Anvita integrates, redesign the payment process for machines. Instead of a human registering for an API key, an agent can directly request a resource from a server, receive a bill for a few cents via an HTTP 402 response code, pay it on-chain with USDC, and receive access—a process that takes about 2 seconds. This "pay-as-authorization" model eliminates the need for stored credentials, a major security risk, and supports microtransactions at a scale where traditional fees, such as Stripe's $0.35 + 2.5% charge, would be prohibitive.
A Crowded Field With Low Starting Volume
Ant Digital joins a high-stakes competition to define the payment standards for AI agents. The field is split between Web2 incumbents adapting their existing rails and Web3 players building new, crypto-native solutions. Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol and Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) largely focus on integrating with existing card and payment networks. In contrast, Anvita, alongside efforts from the Solana Foundation and Coinbase, is betting that the permissionless, global, and always-on nature of stablecoins is a more natural fit.
However, the infrastructure is far ahead of the application layer. While Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong expects agents to eventually surpass human transaction volume, the current reality is one of testing and speculation. According to an OKX Ventures research report, the surge in x402 transactions in late 2025 was driven more by projects competing for rankings on analytics dashboards than by organic commercial use. The road is built, but the cars are not yet on it in significant numbers.
For investors, this represents an infrastructure race rather than an immediate market-share battle. While Web2 solutions from Visa and Stripe may dominate the early market over the next 3 to 5 years due to their existing merchant networks, their structural limitations around micropayments and cross-border settlement could become bottlenecks as agentic commerce scales. Ant’s Anvita is a long-term play on the thesis that a truly autonomous, global agent economy will require a neutral, programmable, and crypto-native settlement layer.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
