AI Agents Take the Wheel: Ant Group’s New Crypto Playground

Ant Digital Technologies, a part of the big Chinese company Ant Group, has launched a fresh platform called Anvita that lets software programs instead of people handle crypto deals. The idea is to create an “agent‑to‑agent economy” where bots own assets, trade, and pay without human hands. Anvita starts with two tools. The first, Anvita TaaS (Tokenization‑as‑a‑Service), helps banks and other institutions turn real‑world items into digital tokens, while also offering safety and treasury features. The second tool, Anvita Flow, is a marketplace where bots can sign up, find each other, plan work, and finish payments instantly. The platform mixes the x402 protocol from Coinbase and Cloudflare, which allows tiny stablecoin payments over simple web requests. Bots can do sub‑cent trades in USDC without needing old‑school billing or approvals. A special “Agent Store” lets developers add tools for data gathering, finance analysis, or even games. The system works with big AI frameworks like OpenClaw and Claude Code, giving creators flexibility in how they host their bots.

Beyond just tokenizing stuff, the vision is that these agents will manage resources, run trades, provide services for users, and automatically settle micro‑transactions while they operate. Other companies are also building similar AI‑commerce infrastructure: Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol focuses on card‑based checkout, Coinbase’s x402 targets stablecoin micro‑payments, and Google’s Agent Payments Protocol has backing from 60+ firms. Mastercard bought a stablecoin company for $1. 8 billion, showing big banks want blockchain settlement too. The Solana network already handled over 15 million agent transactions, and Coinbase’s boss predicts bots will soon outpace humans in trade volume. McKinsey estimates that by 2030, AI agents could control $3 to 5 trillion of global consumer commerce. However, real usage is still small. The x402 protocol moves about $28 k per day, most of it from tests, and analysts say half the transactions look fake.

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