Reap, the Hong Kong-based stablecoin card issuer acquired by Payward—the parent company of Kraken—in July, says the takeover has accelerated its existing roadmap rather than changed it, with agentic payments now the next major focus. Co-founder and CEO Daren Guo told Blockhead on the sidelines of Token2049 week in Singapore that the deal is "very complementary," combining Payward's strong US and European presence with Reap's capabilities in Asia and Latin America. Payward agreed to buy Reap in May for up to $600 million in cash and stock, in a transaction valuing Payward at $20 billion, and completed the acquisition on July 1. Reap continues to operate as a standalone brand under Guo.
Guo emphasized that Reap's headquarters matters less than where its products are consumed, describing Hong Kong as a hub while pointing to Mexico as another critical hub. The company secured a money transmitter registration in Mexico in March and has local teams in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. In September, Reap and Visa announced an expanded collaboration to bring Reap's stablecoin-linked credit card programs to more than 100 markets, extending issuing infrastructure into EMEA and Africa. Visa said its stablecoin settlement volume was at an annual run rate of $20 billion, up 15 times year over year, across more than 160 stablecoin card programs globally.
Reap's agentic payments product, built on Visa Intelligent Commerce, issues tokenised, agent-specific Visa credentials with programmable spending limits and passkey authentication, so an AI agent can complete a checkout without seeing the underlying card number. The product is reportedly running as a pilot with design partners, with a wider launch targeted before the end of the year. Guo described agents as a catalyst to create "net new financial services" and said Reap and Payward are building "the new set of rails for financial services globally."
The broader push toward agentic payments is also attracting major technology and payments companies. Amazon's Bedrock AgentCore Payments, built with Coinbase and Stripe, lets AI agents discover paid services, authenticate, and pay with stablecoins and x402 under preset spending limits. However, industry observers argue that the harder problem comes after payment clears: refunds and disputes when an agent acts outside its authority or the outcome is disputed. Edgars Nemse, CEO of the GenLayer Foundation, told CryptoSlate that payment "is the easy part, because it's deterministic," while judging whether work was delivered as promised is not.
The Reserve Bank of Australia put that gap on the record on October 6, after a payments consultation with 75 stakeholders. Merchants, payment service providers and issuers said chargeback rules leave liability unclear in agentic commerce, and that agentic purchases could raise merchant costs. Mastercard and Datos's 2025 outlook projected 324 million chargebacks worldwide by 2028, with Mastercard's 2026 US merchant benchmark of $128 per chargeback. A 5% increase would add about 16.2 million chargebacks and roughly $2.1 billion in operational costs; a 15% increase would add 48.6 million and about $6.2 billion.
Nemse argued that AI agents will file disputes far more often because filing costs them almost nothing. He sees platforms like Amazon trying to keep control of the customer interface, citing Amazon's block of Meta's Muse shopping agent. His proposed solution is AI validators that reach consensus on outcomes, with decisions enforced on-chain and open to appeal. GenLayer says common cases could finalize in about 30 minutes and fully escalated ones in around three hours. The unresolved question is whether open agentic commerce can develop a credible, neutral dispute process—without it, Nemse argues, "your agent finds the small merchant, and you still go back to Amazon."
