Building the future of agentic payments with Nevermined
How Privy and Nevermined enable agents to participate in real economic activity
Debbie Soon
|Dec 23, 2025
Over the past few years, AI agents have evolved from experiments into foundational building blocks of how the modern internet operates.
Agents can now write code, route information, negotiate decisions, and increasingly act on behalf of humans and businesses. But while agent intelligence has advanced rapidly, the economic layer around agents has lagged behind.
Most agents today can do work effectively, but very few can participate in economic transactions. They lack access to funds, clear identity and permissioning, and last but not least, predictable pricing and settlement.
Without these pieces, agents can reason, but can’t reliably charge, pay, or operate inside real business models. Intelligence without economic agency limits the potential of the agentic economy.
Nevermined was built to solve this problem.
What is Nevermined
But for this model to work, there’s still a missing piece.
Nevermined’s mission is to make every AI agent commercially viable by providing infrastructure for metering, billing, pricing, and settlement between agents.
Instead of embedding economic logic inside individual agents, Nevermined centralizes it at the platform layer. Pricing plans, quotas, usage tracking, and receipts live outside the agent itself. This gives developers predictable revenue mechanics, reduces operational risk, and creates strong guardrails for agent behavior.
In short, Nevermined gives agents a way to operate inside real economic systems by providing them with clarity, control, and accountability.
But for this model to work, there’s still a missing piece.
How Privy provides identity, wallets, and delegation
Agents need a way to access funds, but that access must be tied back to a human owner with explicit authorization and control. In other words, they need identity. This is where Privy comes in.
Privy provides the identity-linked wallet layer that allows humans to onboard agents, fund them, and delegate spending authority safely.
When a user signs into Nevermined through Privy, they bring their identity and wallet with them. This is more than authentication. It’s the foundation of managed delegation.
With Privy, Nevermined users can:
Fund an initial wallet
Define budgets and pricing constraints
Authorize what an agent is allowed to spend
Every action an agent takes is traceable back to a real user, governed by clear permissions, and enforced by code.
Nevermined then applies those permissions across the entire payment flow. This includes handling pricing plans, usage metering, validation, and settlement. Agents execute, while infrastructure enforces human decisions.
Building agentic systems on stablecoin rails
For agentic systems to operate in the real world, their economic layer needs to be global, transparent, and programmable. Stablecoin rails make this possible.
They allow agents to pay other agents directly, with predictable pricing and global accessibility. Because settlement happens onchain, payments are verifiable and easy to audit. Usage-based, recurring, or one-time payments can all be enforced by code rather than embedded into custom agent logic.
Privy abstracts away seed phrases and blockchain complexity so the experience feels familiar, even as the underlying rails are built for automation and scale. Nevermined handles pricing, quotas, metering, and settlement. Together, this gives builders a clean foundation for commercial agent systems. This is whether they choose to integrate directly with Nevermined’s libraries, explore live payment flows in the app, or move faster with workflow-driven platforms like Buildship.
What’s next
As agentic systems move from experimentation to production, the next phase is about new economic patterns. Not just proving that agents can transact, but defining how they should.
Both Privy and Nevermined will continue advancing:
New usage-based and outcome-based billing models for agents
Composable pricing and budget structures across multi-agent workflows
Permissioned spending patterns that balance autonomy with human control
Practical design patterns for metering, receipts, and revenue attribution
We’ll also explore how agentic payments connect to emerging interoperability standards like x402, MCP, A2A, and AP2. These have important implications on building agents that can operate across systems, protocols, and marketplaces with a shared economic language.
Our goal is to help builders move beyond experimentation and design agents that can operate reliably, profitably, and at scale. If you’re building agents that need to transact, monetize, or participate in real economic activity, visit Nevermined, or explore Privy’s agentic wallet recipe to learn more.
