CROSS-CATEGORY: The Agent Payments Protocol War Is Now Six-Deep — And Forerunner Just Funded a Seventh Player
Forerunner led a $30M Series A into Natural on July 20 to build 'the transactional plumbing required for AI agents,' entering a field that already has Google's UCP, OpenAI's ACP, Stripe/Tempo's MPP (Visa as design partner), Google's AP2, Ant International's mobile-first AMP, and Mastercard's Agent Pay for Machines covering cards, accounts, and stablecoins. Adyen shipped the integration layer on June 16 — a three-layer API suite (Agentic Feed, Agentic Cart, Agentic Payments) compatible with Meta's AI checkout and supporting UCP, ACP, and AP2 simultaneously. When a payments processor ships a protocol-agnostic abstraction before the protocols have settled, that's the market pricing in that none of them wins outright — and it means builders should target the abstraction, not any single spec.
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