AIPS protocol

AIPS — Agentic Instant Payment Scheme. Open acquiring protocol for AI-driven commerce. Acquiring-only, scheme-agnostic.

Overview

AIPS is an open protocol that lets AI agents (Claude, GPT-4, custom) pay merchants over an instant-payment rail. It sits one layer above the rail (it's not itself a rail) and provides the missing pieces for agentic commerce: capability discovery, signed mandates, machine-readable receipts.

AIPS is positioned as acquiring-only: it tells the merchant side how to accept payment from an agent. The agent brings its own funding source and trust framework (typically AP2).

Three layers

1. L1 — Rail — the underlying instant-payment scheme (MIA, RoPay, IPS, PI-SPI). AIPS doesn't replace these; it sits on top.
2. L1.5 — Protocol — AIPS itself. Discovery, mandate verification, receipt format. Analog to 3DS or AP2 but for agentic acquiring.
3. L2 — Acceptance — the miaPOS paypoints (POS / SoftPOS / E-comm / Links / Conversational / Agentic) that expose AIPS to merchants.

Capability discovery

An AIPS-capable merchant publishes a well-known descriptor:

{
  "protocol":  "aips",
  "version":   "1.0",
  "rails":     ["mia.md", "ropay.ro"],
  "currencies":["MDL", "RON", "EUR"],
  "ap2": { "supported": true, "version": "0.3" },
  "endpoints": {
    "pay":     "https://merchant.example/aips/v1/pay",
    "receipt": "https://merchant.example/aips/v1/receipt/{id}"
  }
}