Alchemy built AgentCard: safe, spend-controlled one-time-use credit cards that let AI agents pay for anything online. Purchases run on email, so every AgentCard agent gets an AgentMail inbox by default. The result: ~70% increase in agentic transactions post-integration.
Company: Alchemy, the web3 and AI infrastructure company powering developers building onchain and agentic applications
Product: AgentCard, safe, spend-controlled one-time-use credit cards that let AI agents pay for anything online
Problem: Agents can't complete most online purchases without email. Receipts, order confirmations, verification codes, and merchant replies all land in an inbox the agent has to own. AgentCard needed a way to give every agent an inbox programmatically and reliably, through a simple API.
Result: ~70% increase in agentic transactions versus the pre-AgentMail baseline. Every agent using AgentCard now gets an email inbox automatically, by default.
Stack: AgentMail + AgentCard
Who Alchemy Is
Alchemy builds the infrastructure layer that developers rely on to ship onchain and AI-native applications. Their newest product, AgentCard, extends that infrastructure thesis to agentic commerce: if agents are going to act in the real economy, they need a safe way to pay.
What AgentCard Does
AgentCard lets AI agents pay for anything online with safe, spend-controlled, one-time-use credit cards. A developer provisions a card for an agent, sets the limits, and the agent can transact anywhere cards are accepted. No shared corporate card, no human in the loop for every checkout, no unbounded spend risk.
Problem: You can't buy anything online without an email address
The card is only half of a purchase. Try to check out almost anywhere on the internet and the first field on the form is an email address.
Every transaction generates email. Order confirmations. Receipts. Verification codes at signup. Shipping updates. Refund and dispute threads. Merchant follow-ups. For a human, that's routine inbox noise. For an agent, it's load-bearing: without an address to receive at, the purchase flow breaks before the card is ever charged. And without the ability to read what comes back, the agent can't verify an account, confirm an order, extract a receipt, or handle anything that goes wrong afterward.
For AgentCard to deliver on "agents can buy almost anything online," every agent needed a real inbox. Not a shared address, not a forwarding hack. An inbox per agent, provisioned the same way the card is: programmatically, instantly, at scale.
What building it themselves would have cost
The DIY path is familiar to anyone who has tried to give software an email identity. Stand up domains and manage deliverability. Wire an inbound parser and a webhook layer. Build multi-tenant isolation so one customer's agents never touch another's mail. Write extraction logic to turn receipts and confirmations into structured data an agent can act on. Then maintain all of it, forever, as a payments company whose actual product is cards.
That's months of infrastructure work orthogonal to what Alchemy set out to build.
Why AgentMail
"We needed a simple way to give every AI agent an email inbox, programmatically and reliably, that we could interface with through a simple API. The ease of use, reliability, and functionality of AgentMail is unparalleled. There simply was no other alternative remotely as compelling for our agentic use case."
Ben Yu, Project Lead, AgentCard at Alchemy
AgentMail treats inboxes as first-class primitives. Call the API, an agent gets a real address, and it can send and receive from day one. That maps exactly to how AgentCard already provisions cards, so the integration went deep: AgentMail is built into AgentCard such that every agent using AgentCard automatically has access to an email inbox, by default. The developer doesn't wire anything up. The agent gets a card and an inbox in the same motion.
How it works inside AgentCard
| Purchase step | What happens over email | AgentMail feature |
|---|---|---|
| Agent signs up at a merchant | Verification code arrives, agent reads it and completes signup | Programmatic Inboxes + Receive |
| Agent checks out with its card | Order confirmation and receipt land in the agent's inbox | Webhooks (real-time events) |
| Receipt arrives | Line items, totals, and order IDs parsed for records and spend reconciliation | Structured Data Extraction |
| Merchant follows up | Agent reads and replies in-thread | Send and Receive Messages |
| Customers scale to many agents | Each customer's agents isolated on their own domains | Multi-Tenancy + Custom Domains |
Webhooks mean the agent doesn't poll: the moment a verification code or confirmation arrives, the event fires and the agent acts. Structured extraction turns receipts from unstructured HTML into data AgentCard can reconcile against the card's spend controls. Multi-tenancy and custom domains keep every customer's agent fleet cleanly isolated under their own identity.
The Result
Since integrating AgentMail, AgentCard has seen a ~70% increase in agentic transactions versus the prior baseline. When every agent has an inbox by default, the set of things an agent can actually buy expands to nearly everything online.
"The product was flawless in every way and extremely trivial to integrate and onboard into. The team is by far the most hands-on and supportive team we've ever worked with, and even ran a huge marketing campaign with us highlighting our joint collaboration. Can't recommend them more highly."
Ben Yu, Project Lead, AgentCard at Alchemy
Products used: Programmatic Inboxes, Send and Receive, Webhooks, Multi-Tenancy and Custom Domains, Structured Data Extraction.
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