Payman: Autonomous Payment Gateway Between AI and Humans
- Lara Hanyaloglu
- Jul 24
- 4 min read
As AI agents become more autonomous, a new logistical hurdle appears: How do AI systems pay or get paid by humans? Currently, if an AI (say a digital worker or crowdsourcing bot) needs to reward a human or purchase an API service, a human intermediary usually has to handle the transaction. Payman is an early-stage project (founded May 2024) addressing this by creating an AI-to-human payment protocol. The crux of the problem: AI agents aren’t integrated with payment infrastructure; they can’t just Venmo you money or charge your card on their own. Developers building AI that collaborates with people have to write custom code or rely on centralized services to handle payments, which doesn’t scale well and undercuts autonomy. For example, imagine an AI virtual assistant that hires a human freelancer for a task; how does it pay them trustlessly? Payman identified that solving this would unlock a new class of AI workflows where AI can seamlessly compensate humans for help, data labeling, or any service.
So What Does Payman Do?
Payman provides a simple API and smart contract system that any AI model or agent can use to automate payments to users (or vice versa). Essentially, it’s a middleware between AI and traditional payment methods. Payman’s platform works like this: developers integrate Payman’s API into their AI applications; this API allows the AI to create payment orders (like “pay $5 to user X for completing task Y”). Payman then handles the actual transfer using whatever method is appropriate (supporting fiat and crypto). Under the hood, Payman uses stablecoins (like USDC) for crypto and bank/credit integrations for fiat, abstracting complexity for the AI developer. The core innovation is that Payman is building a full autonomous payment processing engine; not requiring manual approval, which is key. They accomplish safety by combining on-chain escrow contracts and AI-triggered webhooks. Payman likely uses a mix of technologies: smart contracts on Ethereum for stablecoin flows, integrated with payment processors (maybe Circle’s APIs, Stripe, etc.) for fiat on/off ramps.
Token and Traction
Payman completed a $3 million pre-seed in Aug 2024 led by Coinbase Ventures, Visa, and Spartan Group; the involvement of Visa is telling (they see the potential of AI-driven payments, and this might align with some of Visa’s crypto initiatives). As of 2025, Payman does not have a token (and might not need one if focusing on enterprise adoption; though a token could incentivize network usage or reward AI/human collaborators). If they ever tokenized, it could serve as a governance token for rules like dispute resolution (imagine an AI says task done but human disagrees, a mechanism needed; maybe token holders arbitrate). But it’s speculative; so far Payman’s value capture seems to be via fees (like taking a small cut of each transaction, similar to how Stripe does for normal payments).
The product traction: They were part of Binance Labs MVB incubator (got in July 2024), and by Devcon Nov 2024, they did a high-profile demo with a K-pop virtual idol + Coinbase showing AI paying human collaborators in USDC. This gave them credibility (even Visa publicly praised them). So they’re on the radar of enterprise as well. They support both fiat & crypto which is huge for adoption. On the crypto side, they integrate with Binance’s BNB chain perhaps (since mention in incubator) and Ethereum.
Upside & Vision
Payman calls itself the “Visa of AI”; that captures the upside: if AIs and humans increasingly collaborate, Payman could be processing millions of microtransactions daily, skimming a fee on each. Near-term, a milestone is expanding support to popular AI platforms. For example, if OpenAI or LangChain integrated Payman, thousands of AI projects could start using it with minimal effort. Another important milestone: finishing their Polygon and Ethereum integration (they mentioned deploying on Polygon for cheap stablecoin tx, and possibly hooking into Coinbase’s Base given CB Ventures invested). In crypto, the synergy is using stablecoins like USDC; interestingly, Circle (issuer of USDC) also invested in similar project Skyfire as per chaincatcher, indicating stablecoin providers want to be rails for these payments. Payman’s traction so far includes being one of the standout projects in Coinbase’s blog on AI + Crypto and receiving multiple mentions by industry leaders, which bodes well.
Competition
A couple of others like Skyfire target AI agent payments but focusing more on crypto and agent-to-agent (like machine paying machine). Payman is distinct in heavily addressing AI-human use cases and building both fiat and crypto support plus dashboards for oversight. It’s well positioned to lead that niche. In terms of potential token, if they do, I could see it used for staking by devs for larger payment limits (like deposit Payman tokens to unlock bigger daily transfer limits for your AI; a way to ensure good behavior via skin in game). At seed, none yet though.
In a nutshell
As AI-human collaboration grows, expect to hear Payman’s name come up as the solution enabling, say, an AI marketplace to smoothly pay its human contributors globally 24/7. In a world where your future AI colleague might send you money for help, Payman could be the invisible infrastructure making that happen.
