# Agentic tokens can preserve card-network protections

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/agentic-tokens-can-preserve-card-network-protections/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Terry Angelos](https://realalpha.app/people/terry-angelos/) · Terry Angelos is chief strategy officer and board member of VGS. · Co-founded TrialPay, ran DriveWealth, and led Visa's fintech and crypto teams; now VGS chief strategy officer.
- Host: [Erik Torenberg](https://realalpha.app/people/erik-torenberg/) · General partner, Andreessen Horowitz · Helped build Product Hunt; founded On Deck, Village Global and Turpentine.
- Show: a16z Podcast
- Episode: [Agentic Commerce: Why Your Wallet Is About to Change](https://realalpha.app/v/q8cb1XL9sXA/), Oct 15, 2026
- Moment: 19:49 to 26:59 of the episode (7 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/agentic-tokens-can-preserve-card-network-protections/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/q8cb1XL9sXA/?t=1189

## Quote

> “They purchased the chandeliers on my behalf. They issued their own, actually this is like a Visa virtual card, **one-time use card**, made the purchase”
> — [Terry Angelos](https://realalpha.app/people/terry-angelos/) at [21:15](https://realalpha.app/v/q8cb1XL9sXA/?t=1275) · a16z Podcast

## Takeaways

1. Stripe’s one-time card worked, but Walmart saw Stripe rather than Terry’s card.
2. A token can pass a consumer’s card safely through an agent to a merchant.
3. The approach could preserve chargebacks and merchant follow-on sales.

## About this segment

Terry Angelos contrasts Stripe’s one-time virtual card with agentic tokens that let a merchant charge the consumer’s card directly. That can retain chargebacks and make follow-on purchases easier.

From “Agentic Commerce: Why Your Wallet Is About to Change”, Oct 15, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/q8cb1XL9sXA/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[20:01](https://realalpha.app/v/q8cb1XL9sXA/?t=1201) And what's happening with agentic commerce is we're sort of getting this sort of blend of the two. And it's such a new ecosystem that it actually has parallels for me back to the early days of the internet. And for those people who were around in the sort of AOL era, Stripe in many ways is like the AOL of agentic commerce. And I mean that as a compliment in the sense that they figured out how to make agentic commerce just work in a way that's a very kind of, you know, sort of, you know, walled garden approach.

[20:37](https://realalpha.app/v/q8cb1XL9sXA/?t=1237) So, you know, a few examples here would be if I use Stripe Link, Link's only available at a million merchants. So it's great if, in fact, the item that I want is available at one of those million merchants. But very often, it's available at some place where there isn't a Stripe Link connection. So a good example was, I think two weeks ago, I had this event at my house. I wanted to buy some outdoor lights. And I asked Instinct to go and help me find these lights. And it found the lights at Walmart, which makes a ton of sense.

[21:08](https://realalpha.app/v/q8cb1XL9sXA/?t=1268) Walmart has lots of inventory. And the agent went, loaded the cart. And when it came time to pay, Link didn't have a connection to Walmart. Link has my card, but it can't just give my card over to the agent and over to Walmart. So Stripe did something pretty interesting. They purchased the chandeliers on my behalf. They issued their own, actually this is like a Visa virtual card, one-time use card, made the purchase, and then they charged me, Terry, at a second transaction.

[21:43](https://realalpha.app/v/q8cb1XL9sXA/?t=1303) This is a little bit how like DoorDash works today. You know, you like spend a hundred bucks at DoorDash and then the Dasher goes and pays the restaurant. But in the case of this Walmart transaction, this is the point about it sort of being the AOL, it worked just great. Like, actually, the item showed up, the transaction went through, I was charged the right amount. But if there's a problem with the chandelier, typically I call up my bank, Capital One, and I say, hey, I had this transaction with Walmart, something went wrong.

[22:15](https://realalpha.app/v/q8cb1XL9sXA/?t=1335) And they say, well, we don't see a Walmart transaction here. We just see a Stripe transaction. In fact, you will find this pretty funny. I know someone who, in the sort of testing phase, did this exact flow on their Amex card, called up Amex and said, hey, this transaction with the merchant didn't go through, but Amex only saw Stripe. So they gave them a phone number to call whoever this link merchant is.

[22:43](https://realalpha.app/v/q8cb1XL9sXA/?t=1363) The person called them, it went straight to the cell phone of a Stripe engineer. Because Stripe's not set up to run a chargeback, you know, sort of call center. Well, this is, I mean, like one of the reasons why Visa and MasterCard have such impregnable positions is because they intermediate everything and they set the rules and chargebacks are very important, right? Like what if I paid for something?

[23:04](https://realalpha.app/v/q8cb1XL9sXA/?t=1384) It's a trust mechanism. I pay you for something. I pay you for lights. You don't deliver the lights. Like, oh, shoot, I don't have money anymore. What do I do? No, no, no. You actually have rules by which I can kind of lodge a complaint and then there is a central intermediary that helps, you know, adjudicate those complaints in a way that is, you know, more or less fair that both parties agree on.

[23:26](https://realalpha.app/v/q8cb1XL9sXA/?t=1406) I mean, it's part of the problem. Like, this is why crypto, cool, but like, it's a bearer instrument. I pay you with crypto. I'm never getting that back, which again can be a bug or a feature. But for your lights example, like what if the lights don't work? You want to have Visa and MasterCard in the middle. That's high, high utility, actually even for the merchant because now I'm much more willing to buy with a merchant knowing that if they don't actually deliver a product that works, I can get my money back.

[23:52](https://realalpha.app/v/q8cb1XL9sXA/?t=1432) So that trust mechanism is very important. But again, if you add all these kind of interesting and very clever engineering steps, Just the purpose, it doesn't work as well. Yeah, so this is, I think, the right sort of direction of travel from the AOL ecosystem to the open standards ecosystem. The card networks have actually come out with a new type of standard. They're called agentic tokens that will allow a wallet like a Stripe Link or a ShopPay or a PayPal to hand over a credential to the agent in a safe way and then have the agent hand it to the merchant in such a way that when that Walmart transaction occurred, it's my card.

[24:36](https://realalpha.app/v/q8cb1XL9sXA/?t=1476) In fact, like one sort of, you know, addendum to the Walmart transaction, after I bought the chandelier, everything was fine, I got an email from Walmart to say, hey, Terry, you paid for delivery. It was like $6.99. Why don't you sign up to Walmart Plus? And here's an offer. If you sign up today, we will credit the delivery toward your Walmart Plus subscription. So I said, great, hit the button. And of course, the transaction failed because the card that they had was the Stripe one-time use card.

[25:08](https://realalpha.app/v/q8cb1XL9sXA/?t=1508) And part of the, you know, you mentioned like rules and norms, part of the norms of e-commerce is that Walmart spends a lot of money to get me as a customer. And then they have the right to try to have a relationship with me, upsell me, cross-sell me. And in this case, because we were using the sort of AOL version, they weren't able to easily allow me to subscribe to this new service. With the new agentic standards, what should happen is if any of the wallets don't have a relationship with the merchant, but they have my card on file, my Capital One Visa card, that should be tokenized with the agent.

[25:50](https://realalpha.app/v/q8cb1XL9sXA/?t=1550) There's a whole process by which the agent says, I'm about to make a transaction. I'm a verified agent. I'm going to spend no more than $100. The token is nothing more than a new 16-digit number. We give that safely to the agent. Agent gives it to Walmart. And then Walmart runs the transaction, but it's my card that is being charged. And that preserves this ability to have a follow-on transaction.

[26:16](https://realalpha.app/v/q8cb1XL9sXA/?t=1576) It preserves all of the rules around chargebacks. And so, you know, three months ago, this was at zero. It did not exist. VGS is by far the largest provisioner of these agentic tokens. We do it for the agents. We do it for the wallets. We do it for some of the merchants. And this was, you know, zero three months ago. Now we're doing a few million of these tokens per week. So I expect that as we make this transition from the walled garden to the sort of open standards, this will be the way that agentic commerce evolves.