Sam Altman–backed identity project World has teamed up with Coinbase to tackle a looming bottleneck for the next wave of commerce: proving a real person is behind every AI-driven transaction.
As autonomous AI agents increasingly transact, shop and negotiate online, estimates put the potential “agentic commerce” market at $3 trillion to $5 trillion by 2030, with agents possibly accounting for as much as 25% of U.S. e‑commerce. Payments are only half the story — identity is the other. Without a reliable way to link agents to unique humans, platforms risk abuse (one person running thousands of paying agents) or blunt defenses that simply block all automated traffic — which would also block legitimate software acting on users’ behalf.
World’s answer is AgentKit, a developer toolkit launched Tuesday that lets AI agents carry cryptographic proof tying them to a verified human via World ID (the project’s proof-of-human system). AgentKit is designed to integrate with x402, a protocol built by Coinbase and Cloudflare that embeds stablecoin micropayments into the internet’s communication layer so agents can pay each other autonomously. “Payments are the ‘how’ of agentic commerce, but identity is the ‘who,’” said Erik Reppel, head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform and x402’s founder. “This is a massive step toward a web where agents aren’t just seen as automated traffic, but as legitimate economic participants.”
Practically, AgentKit lets developers link multiple agents to the same verified person. That lets platforms enforce identity-level rules — for example, one trial per human or a daily cap on bookings — regardless of how many agents an individual runs. “One person could run thousands of agents that all pay small fees,” said DC Builder, a research engineer at the World Foundation. “Proof of Human addresses this gap.”
Privacy and scale were core design goals. World says AgentKit uses zero-knowledge proofs so platforms can confirm an agent represents a real person without collecting or storing personal data. Today’s beta relies on World’s Orb-based biometric verification — the project’s most controversial component — but World says it will expand credential types in future releases. Planned additions include NFC-enabled passports and IDs via “World ID Credentials,” enabling attribute proofs (age, nationality, etc.) without exposing underlying personal data. “Beyond the beta, we plan to expand AgentKit alongside the next generation of the World ID protocol,” a World spokesperson said.
The move arrives amid bullish predictions about agent-driven transactions: Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong recently said he expects “very soon” there will be more AI agents than humans making transactions, and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao predicted agents will make vastly more payments than people — “and they will use crypto.”
World already counts millions of verifications: its real-time human verification meter read 17,912,203 at the time of writing, placing it among the largest proof-of-personhood networks globally. World positions AgentKit not as a replacement for other identity systems but as a foundational, privacy-preserving “proof of human” layer that developers can use alone or alongside other identity solutions.
If agentic commerce takes off as forecast, combining agentic payments (x402) with a scalable proof-of-human system (AgentKit/World ID) could be a keystone for an economy where software agents act as bona fide economic actors on behalf of people.
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