Part 2: What is Agentic Commerce—A World Where Refrigerators Order, Inspect, and Pay Simultaneously

The Liberal Democratic Party's proposal cites symbolic examples such as a home refrigerator delegating ordering and payment to an AI based on the family's nutritional balance, or a manufacturing site where automated payments in yen-denominated stablecoins are executed simultaneously with the inspection of parts, allowing delivered accounts receivable to be liquidated instantly. Collectively, this is "Agentic Commerce"—an economy where AI agents act as buyers, executing the purchasing lifecycle from discovery and approval to payment and fulfillment.
This is by no means a story of the future. In the United States, Coinbase's x402 protocol reported approximately 69,000 active agents and a cumulative 165 million transactions processed as of April 2026. McKinsey estimates that this will impact commerce on the scale of $3 to $5 trillion by 2030.

Why can't we run on the "human-use rails"?

Current payment infrastructure is designed on the premise that humans put items in a basket and humans press buttons. Agent purchasing raises three new questions.
1. Authority: Is this agent truly buying based on the user's intent? (Prevention of impersonation and runaway processes)
2. Granularity: Can existing rails handle ultra-small, high-frequency payments, such as less than 1 yen per API call?
3. Always-on: Agents do not sleep. We cannot rely on bank business hours or batch processing.
Overseas, a set of protocols with divided roles—AP2 (authority), ACP/UCP (purchasing flow), and x402/MPP (small-amount instant payment)—is emerging to address these three questions (detailed in Part 6).

The reason I want to do this quickly

Japan lagged behind the world in cashless adoption and took 20 years to catch up. Agentic commerce is the next game. Fortunately, this time we are in a position to have both one of the world's leading instant transfer networks, the Zengin System, and the new TD/SC rails we are about to build. I believe that now, while the protocol competition has not yet been decided, is the final window for Japanese practitioners to participate in the design.