Key Takeaways
- Animoca Brands, in collaboration with Visa, completed a Hong Kong pilot in which AI agents on its Minds platform find relevant Visa card rewards and complete purchases on behalf of users
- Previous Visa Intelligent Commerce pilots were led by European banks and payment providers; this is one of the first driven by a consumer-facing Web3 agent platform
- Once agents decide which card to pay with, rewards and offers become machine-readable assets — a shift that will reshape promotion design for e-commerce and booking businesses
A Live Pilot of Agent-Executed Purchasing in Hong Kong
Animoca Brands has completed a live pilot of AI-powered commerce capabilities developed in collaboration with Visa, enabling AI agents on its Minds platform to identify relevant Visa rewards and complete purchases on behalf of users.
technode.globalOn July 8, 2026, Hong Kong-based Web3 company Animoca Brands announced it had completed a live pilot of AI-powered commerce capabilities developed in collaboration with Visa. AI agents on the company's platform, Minds by Animoca Brands, can now identify relevant Visa card rewards for users and complete purchases on their behalf at selected merchants in Hong Kong.
The first participating merchant is the Bruce Lee Club Ltd eShop, which sells official Bruce Lee merchandise. As payment network pilots go, the starting point is a small storefront — but Animoca Brands simultaneously demonstrated the purchasing skill at its booth at LEAP East, the technology conference held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. This was staged as a consumer-facing showcase, not merely a technical verification.
What Minds Agents Can Now Do
The pilot introduces two new agent-led "skills." One executes purchases using Visa Intelligent Commerce (VIC); the other consults a cardholder rewards and benefits directory. Combined, they let the entire flow — from finding a reward to paying — complete inside the agent.
Start with the purchasing skill. Until now, most AI assistants stopped at searching, comparing, and planning. With VIC embedded, Minds agents handle the final step: completing the transaction. They operate strictly within preferences and spending controls the user has pre-authorized, and payments use Visa's tokenized payment credentials. Authentication, transaction controls, and fraud protections are all provided by Visa's infrastructure. In other words, the agent never touches raw card numbers — it pays using network-issued tokens within a defined permission envelope.
The rewards directory looks modest but carries larger implications. Minds agents can surface relevant Visa Hong Kong and China offers based on a user's eligible cards, preferences, and intended purchase journey. Until now, consumers had to browse campaign pages themselves and manually compare which card would yield the best value. The agent takes over that work and folds reward options directly into the shopping experience. Final purchase decisions remain with the user, but the initial shortlist of which reward to use and which card to pay with will come from the AI.
Yat Siu, chairman of Animoca Brands, framed the significance this way.
For most of the history of digital payments, innovation has meant making the same consumer journey faster or less expensive. Agentic commerce introduces a more fundamental shift by allowing an AI agent to act on a user's behalf within clearly defined permissions.
Not speed, not lower fees — changing who executes the purchase. That is the stated rationale for partnering with Visa. Siu describes the VIC integration as a bridge connecting the emerging agentic world with commerce infrastructure built around humans.
How Far Visa Intelligent Commerce Has Progressed
To understand this announcement, it helps to trace Visa's strategy. Visa unveiled VIC on April 30, 2025 — an initiative to open its payment network to AI agents, built from five modules: authentication, tokenization, payment instructions, personalization, and transaction signals. Card details are tokenized via Visa payment passkeys, so agents can execute payments without ever handling real card numbers.
A little over a year after the announcement, 2026 has seen the pilots turn concrete. Two European milestones on July 2, 2026 stand out. Payment provider Nuvei, working with Visa, demonstrated a merchant-side AI agent initiating a purchase on a shopper's behalf and completing payment inside the agent, with no hand-off to a separate payment flow. The same day, Worldline, ING, and Visa completed a live agentic payment in Germany that satisfied Europe's Strong Customer Authentication requirements. In Spain, CaixaBank completed a pilot processing an AI-agent-initiated transaction with real card data on standard merchant systems.
Line these up and a division of labor emerges. The European pilots were led by infrastructure-side players — banks, payment providers, acquirers — verifying regulatory compliance and compatibility with existing rails. The Animoca Brands pilot, by contrast, connects to VIC from the side of a consumer agent platform that people actually use. Visa is building proof points on both fronts in parallel. And it is notable that one of the first consumer-touchpoint regions chosen was not Europe or the US but Hong Kong — a signal worth watching for how agentic commerce unfolds across Asian markets.
The rewards directory is another element absent from the European pilots. Beyond executing payments, letting agents read card rewards — an issuer's promotional asset — has few concrete precedents; this pilot is one of them. For card issuers, rewards only work if consumers notice them. In a world where agents auto-discover benefits, that discoverability problem dissolves — but rewards also enter a new competitive environment where AI compares them continuously.
Why a Web3 Company Plays This Role
Animoca Brands is best known as a major Web3 investor behind The Sandbox and Moca Network — it is not a payments company. What positioned it as Visa's consumer-touchpoint partner is its rapid investment in AI agent infrastructure.
Minds is a platform for deploying always-on, user-controlled AI agents without running servers or managing hardware. Its Bazaar marketplace lets users add tools, apps, and skills to their agents and orchestrate multiple specialized agents on collaborative tasks. The new VIC purchasing skill and rewards directory are delivered as skills within this Bazaar structure. In May 2026, the company launched a $10 million investment program for the Minds ecosystem, alongside co-investments in AI trading protocols. The through-line is applying a Web3 design philosophy — users managing their own assets and permissions — to AI agent permission management.
From Visa's perspective, the pattern reads as region-fit partner selection: banks in heavily regulated Europe, a Web3 company in digitally fluent Hong Kong. Winning the standard for agent payments requires more than validating payment rails; it means allying with the platforms that win the race for actual agent users.
What This Means for E-Commerce and Booking Businesses
This is not just a story for Visa cardholders or Hong Kong consumers. For anyone selling products or services, at least three changes are approaching.
First, transactions executed by agents are now real. Nuvei is targeting general availability in the second half of 2026, preparing protocol compatibility and agent risk scoring for commercial rollout. How to accept and verify agent-originated orders is becoming an implementation-schedule question, not a distant research topic.
Second, the premises of promotion design shift. When offers and rewards are consumed by agents in machine-readable form, tactics that compete for human attention — prominent banners, email blasts — lose relative effectiveness. What matters instead is publishing offer terms in formats agents can interpret, and structuring terms that win in side-by-side comparison. Hotel and travel booking businesses will face the same class of problem with member benefits and rate structures.
Third, where trust lives. In this design, users continuously govern when, how, and under what conditions their agents can act. Spending caps and pre-authorization frameworks protect consumers, but they also reassure merchants: an agent-originated order arrives with credit and identity already vouched for. Conversely, merchants accepting agent traffic outside this framework must judge impersonation and fraud risk on their own. Whether to ride the tokenization and transaction controls that card networks provide becomes a practical fork in the road for merchants in the agent era.
Conclusion
Measured by transaction volume or merchant count, the Animoca Brands and Visa pilot in Hong Kong is a small step. But it is among the earliest cases of Visa Intelligent Commerce — which had been validated on the infrastructure side in Europe — connecting to a consumer-facing agent platform in Asia, and it introduces automated rewards discovery as a new element. Beyond payment execution, the decisions of what to choose and which card to pay with are starting to move to agents. If Nuvei's second-half 2026 commercial availability arrives on schedule, agent-driven purchasing moves from pilots into operations. Sellers should assume the preparation window is shorter than it looks.
