Stripe · 2026-04-29 · major
Stripe Link for Agents — One-Time-Use Cards and Shared Payment Tokens for 250M Wallet Users
At Sessions 2026 Stripe announced Link's agent wallet plus Issuing for agents. Users grant agents OAuth access; each spend request issues a one-time-use card or Shared Payment Token, with consumer approval per transaction. Real card details never reach the agent.
Stripe's consumer wallet now lets AI agents pay on a user's behalf using one-time-use cards or Shared Payment Tokens, with per-transaction approval.
Key specs
| Link wallet users | 250M+ |
|---|---|
| Sessions 2026 launches | 288 |
| Sessions 2026 attendees | 9,000+ |
What is it?
Link is Stripe's existing consumer wallet, with over 250M users globally. At Stripe Sessions 2026 on April 29, the company announced two new agent-payment products on top of it: the Link wallet for agents, and Issuing for agents. The Link wallet for agents lets a user authorize an agent (for example OpenClaw) via OAuth and then receive per-transaction approval prompts in Link's iOS or Android app or on the web. Issuing for agents is a lower-level set of APIs for fintech, marketplace, and SaaS platforms to build their own agent wallets with single-use virtual cards, fund storage, spending controls, and fraud monitoring.
How does it work?
When an agent wants to pay, it requests access to a user's Link wallet through OAuth. The user reviews each spend request — amount, currency, merchant scope — and approves it. Stripe then issues either a one-time-use virtual card backed by the user's existing wallet payment methods, or a Shared Payment Token (SPT) the agent can present at checkout. The agent never sees the underlying card or bank credentials. Stripe's roadmap includes spending limits and pre-approved autonomous transactions, agentic tokens, and stablecoin support.
Why does it matter?
Agent commerce has lacked credit-card-grade primitives. Existing approaches either hand the agent a real card (terrifying scope), or build a parallel crypto rail (small audience). Link plugs agents into a 250M-user existing wallet with cards, banks, BNPL, and crypto already linked, and uses one-time-use cards plus per-transaction approvals to bound the blast radius of any single mistake. With OpenClaw and other agents already wired in at launch, this is the first mainstream agent payment rail with retail-scale distribution.
Who is it for?
Builders of agentic shopping, scheduling, and back-office automations; fintech and marketplace platforms
Try it
Get started at link.com/agents or read the Issuing for agents docs at docs.stripe.com/issuing/agents