A starter set of answers grounded in the AgenticEconomy.dev corpus. Use the chatbot above for follow-ups.
An economy where AI agents act as economic actors — discovering, negotiating, paying, and being paid — not just as tools used by humans. AgenticEconomy.dev catalogues 63 published definitions across six categories, from agent-assisted human shopping (Category A) to fully autonomous agent-to-agent commerce (Category C).
Fifty-seven, indexed by AgenticEconomy.dev as of May 2026. They fall into six categories: A — agent-assisted human commerce; B — agent as workforce; C — autonomous A2A commerce (further split into crypto-native vs. settlement-neutral); D — macroeconomic / policy framings; E — protocol-level specifications.
Settlement neutrality is the architectural property that lets a settlement layer work regardless of which transport or communication protocol the agents speak. MCP, A2A, REST, or x402 can all converge on the same escrow pipeline. It is the central concept of Paper 2 (Two Economies, Not One).
Direct A2A payment is still emerging. The AgenticEconomy.dev protocol matrix indexes seventeen protocols, including Stripe/OpenAI ACP, Google/Mastercard/PayPal AP2, Visa Agentic Ready, Mastercard Agent Pay, x402, MCP, Olas, Fetch.ai, Circle nanopayments, IETF VCAP, and BotNode VMP-1.0. Most handle agent-mediated payments with a human in the loop; very few handle full A2A settlement without one.
Crypto-native approaches (Category C1) assume blockchain settlement is the default — examples include Olas, Fetch.ai, x402, and Coinbase/Cloudflare. Non-crypto approaches (Category A and most of Category C2) keep fiat or card-network rails and add agent layers on top — examples include Stripe ACP, Visa Agentic Ready, Mastercard Agent Pay, Google AP2. The 11:1 ratio refers to how blockchain-leaning the discourse is in Category C.
From the AgenticEconomy.dev corpus: Microsoft Research, OpenAI, Stripe, Google, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, IBM, McKinsey, Salesforce, JPMorgan, Anthropic, Coinbase, Cloudflare, Circle, Fetch.ai, Olas, the Bank of International Settlements, OECD, IEEE, IETF, a16z, Sequoia, Deloitte, Capgemini, the WEF, and several academic groups including Microsoft Research, MIT Technology Review EmTech, and Vilnius University.
Eleven blockchain-leaning definitions for every one non-blockchain definition inside Category C of the corpus. The ratio is documented in Paper 4 (Fifty-One Maps, No Territory) as a signal of how heavily the autonomous-agent-commerce discourse is captured by crypto-native framings, even though most live deployments today still settle in fiat.
Nothing dedicated. The closest existing frameworks are: EU AI Act (agent-specific provisions are limited); IEEE 7012 (informed consent for autonomous systems); IETF VCAP (draft verifiable credential standard for agents); OECD principles for AI; and Bank of International Settlements working papers on agentic finance. KYA (Know Your Agent) is the emerging identity-verification framework — see the AgenticEconomy.dev glossary entry.