The agent economy is not being built in a corner by a handful of startups. It is being built in the open by some of the largest companies in technology and finance, alongside a lively field of focused newcomers, and the striking thing is how much of it is arriving as shared standards rather than walled gardens. This page is a plain map of the main efforts, grouped by what they do. Because the landscape shifts quickly, treat this as a considered snapshot, and look to the Analysis section for the latest moves and the reasoning behind them.

Communication and standards

The communication layer has two anchors. Google introduced the Agent-to-Agent protocol, A2A, for how agents discover and work with one another, and then placed it under the neutral stewardship of the Linux Foundation, where a large number of major technology firms now contribute to it. Anthropic introduced the Model Context Protocol, MCP, for how agents connect to their tools, and it has been adopted widely enough to become a default. The big cloud platforms, the places where most agents actually run, have integrated these standards into their offerings, which is what turns a specification into something builders can rely on. The pattern to notice is that the foundational plumbing is being handed to neutral bodies rather than kept proprietary, which is unusual and healthy.

Payments

The payments layer is the most crowded and the fastest moving, because the prize is large and several kinds of company want it. Coinbase introduced x402, the method that lets an agent pay inside a normal web request, and contributed it to the Linux Foundation as open infrastructure. Google introduced AP2, the Agent Payments Protocol, which concerns how spending is authorized within limits, and gathered a broad group of payment companies around it. Stripe, through its Tempo project, is building toward the recurring and coordinated payments that real businesses depend on. And the established card networks are developing their own agent-ready credentials, so that the existing machinery of payments can take part rather than be routed around. Underneath much of this activity sits the stablecoin, the steady-value digital money that makes tiny, instant, cross-border payments practical.

Identity and trust

The identity layer, fittingly for the hardest problem, is the least consolidated and the most experimental. Rather than a single dominant company, it is being shaped across the open-source and crypto communities, where efforts such as the Ethereum-based ERC-8004 standard aim to give agents verifiable identities and checkable reputations. This is the part of the map most likely to look different a year from now, and it is the part most worth watching, because whoever establishes trusted identity establishes the ground everything else stands on.

Infrastructure and the newcomers

Around these three layers sits a widening ring of supporting work: the frameworks developers use to build agents, the wallets that let agents hold and spend value safely, and a stream of startups tackling narrow pieces of the puzzle, from agent directories to monitoring to safety tooling. This ring changes fastest of all, which is precisely why a durable map names the layers and the anchors rather than trying to list every company. The shape of the field, communication and payments maturing quickly while identity and governance lag behind, tells you more than any single logo, and it is the shape this whole site is organized around.