AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol)

In plainer words

AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) is a payments protocol led by Google. It's after the same big thing as x402 — letting AI agents pay safely — but from a different angle. x402 focuses on completing a payment inside a single API call; AP2 focuses on proving the payment was actually authorized by the user. Its core is the "mandate": the user signs an authorization first (say, "may spend up to $50 on a flight"), and the agent carries that signature when it pays, so the merchant can confirm this isn't the agent spending on a whim but the user's real intent. Why does that matter? Because agents can be tricked (see "prompt injection"). Without a verifiable mandate, a merchant can't tell "the user wanted this" from "the agent was manipulated into it." AP2 uses cryptographic signatures to pin down user intent so it can't be tampered with in transit. Think of it as another main road for agent payments. The field is young — x402, AP2 and others coexist and are still competing and converging; no clear winner yet. OceanAlt's compliance layer is built to not depend on any single protocol, so it plugs into whichever road takes off.