Mastercard

Agent Pay for Machines on the XRP Ledger

Mastercard describes Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M) as Discover → Authorize → Execute → Settle: authorize once, transact many times, guarantee payment now, settle later. Pilot maps each step to an XRPL-native primitive and uses Mastercard's own public artifacts on top.

The five beats

Beat	How Pilot does it
Human	Verified with Mastercard Open Finance (account owner and balance). The browser only sees a masked owner; only hashes go into the vault.
Intent	The owner signs once: a Verifiable Intent mandate (SD-JWT, the open spec from Mastercard and Google) plus an on-ledger budget lock.
Agent	Pilot's paying account holds an `AP4M-Agent` XRPL Credential. Merchants accept deposits only from credentialed payers (`DepositPreauth` with `AuthorizeCredentials`), so the ledger itself enforces Know Your Agent.
Merchant	Demo merchants validate in the order from Mastercard's Level 3 Agentic Commerce guide: agent identity (Web Bot Auth, RFC 9421 signatures) → intent → payment, where the payment object is an XRPL payment.
Settle	Paid per call by x402 `exact` payments or off-ledger payment-channel claims, redeemed in one transaction, with a receipt chain (mandate → intent → L3 → payment → ledger) kept as dispute evidence.

Two gates before any payment

ap4m.purchase checks the engine's policy and the mandate constraints (active, not expired, payee, SKU, per-payment, daily and total limits, ap4m_enabled). Any failure blocks with the rule named.

Operations

Family	Operations
Mandates	`mandate.prepare`, `mandate.register`, `mandate.status`, `mandate.revoke`
Credentials	`credential.status`, `credential.payerAccept`, `credential.ids`
Channels	`channel.status`, `channel.list`
Merchants	`merchants.list`, `merchants.get`
Purchase	`ap4m.purchase`
XRPL EVM vouchers	`ap4m.evmPrepareApproval`, `ap4m.evmBindVoucher`, `ap4m.evmRecordSubmission`, `ap4m.evmReconcile`, `ap4m.evmStatus` (mock only)
Mastercard Developers MCP	`mastercard.services`, `mastercard.docs`, `mastercard.page`, `mastercard.search`

The model gets two tools: merchants_search and ap4m_purchase (merchant and SKU only). It never receives keys, SD-JWTs, raw merchant content or raw Open Finance data.

Mastercard Developers MCP

The engine federates Mastercard's public Developers MCP (https://developer.mcp.mastercard.com) into its own search, with a 24-hour cache. Results are labelled external reference data and treated as untrusted.

Configuration

# Pilot
MASTERCARD_OF_MODE=mock      # mock | sandbox (sandbox needs partner ID, secret, app key; US IP)
AP4M_DEMO_ENABLED=false
 
# Engine
AP4M_DEMO_ENABLED=false
AP4M_EVM_EVENT_ENABLED=false     # XRPL EVM voucher flow
AP4M_EVM_EVENT_MODE=off          # off | mock
MASTERCARD_MCP_ENABLED=      # unset or "true" enables; "false" disables

Demo merchants (services/ap4m-merchants, FastAPI): Venue Yield Desk and Risk Oracle. Demo page: /demo/ap4m.

Honest labels

Pilot does not call any Mastercard AP4M or Agent Pay API (early access is partner-gated). Stand-ins are always labelled:

Mastercard Open Finance · mock / · sandbox
Demo Network — Mastercard's role in production (credential and VI issuer)
Verifiable Intent v0.1 · verified with Mastercard's reference implementation
Validation flow from Mastercard's Level 3 Agentic Commerce guide · payment object: XRPL
ap4m-sandbox · requires Mastercard early-access credentials

Pilot never claims to be Mastercard certified or compliant, and never shows card forms or card logos.

Status

Mock-first, with offline, cross-language and UI evidence. Open Finance sandbox and live Testnet checks are event-day gates. Details: docs/ap4m.md.

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