Alipay AI Pay Launches — Enables OpenClaw-Compatible Agents to Make Payments Autonomously
April 21st, 2026 may end up being remembered as the day the agent economy went financial. On the same day, two major players — Ant Group’s Alipay and Coinbase’s x402 protocol — each launched infrastructure enabling AI agents to transact autonomously, on opposite sides of the globe and with meaningfully different approaches. Here’s what happened, what it means for agentic practitioners, and how these two launches relate to each other. ...