Para CEO Says Crypto’s Agent-Payments Standards Race Won’t Have a Single Winner

Nitya Subramanian, whose firm builds the wallet layer for AI agents, says Coinbase’s x402 has won over grassroots developers, but that recourse-heavy rivals from Google and Stripe will carve up the market by transaction type.

Nitya Subramanian, CEO of Para, join Laura Shin on Unchained Premium

Posted September 3, 2026 at 9:55 pm EST.

The company that provisions wallets for AI agents thinks the contest to standardize how those agents pay will not produce one victor. Nitya Subramanian, CEO of wallet-infrastructure firm Para, said on Unchained that x402, the open payment standard from Coinbase, has taken an early lead with independent developers precisely because “it’s been the easiest to set up,” and that ease is “what’s led to the majority of the adoption that we’re seeing on the bottoms up side.”

Her read matters because Para sits underneath many of these systems and, by her own description, takes “a somewhat neutral stance” across the competing rails. Agent payments have become a crowded field: x402 settles high-frequency stablecoin micropayments over a revived HTTP status code, while Google‘s Agent Payments Protocol and the Stripe-and-Paradigm Machine Payments Protocol stake out different ground.