AI Agents can now book hotels and pay with crypto

But eventually we want to have a product offering that allows any agent anywhere in the world to access, you know, any trip. Whether it's hotels, flights, activities or car rentals, seamlessly just like users do nowadays. Crypto markets move fast. You need research that keeps up. That's The Stack, Grayscale's blog with sharp analysis from the team that's tracked digital assets since 2013. Head to grayscale.com slash the stack. Digital asset vaults offer transparency, but what about the risks behind the returns? S&P Global Ratings' new vault risk assessment delivers independent, forward-looking insight into vault credit quality, governance, and risk management. Move beyond transaction transparency to risk transparency. Learn more at spglobal.com slash ratings. Inside a dependable watch, hundreds of moving parts become one precise signal. Digital asset markets are just as complex. CoinDesk data and indices Turns fragmented market data into institutional grade data Reference rates and regulated indices Benchmarks used to price markets and build financial products Trusted by institutions for more than a decade CoinDesk data and indices Build on the market standard Juan Otero, welcome to Markets Outlook Thank you for having me Thanks for being here Now we are talking all about the Binance ecosystem BNB chain today Travala is working with Binance Pay and BNB Chain to help AI agents not only find you a hotel, but pay for it. Talk to me about this recent news. Just lay a quick foundation for us. Yeah, it's a great product. So we just launched the Travala AI Travel Agent that basically allows you to talk to an agent like you talk to a human to book a hotel anywhere in the world. We support over 230 countries with over 2.2 million hotels. So, you don't need an account, you don't need credit cards, and you don't need to download any apps. You basically talk to an agent, tell them where you're going, and it finds a hotel for you, and you basically just pay for it with a crypto wallet. Nice and simple. And now you're enabling that to go one step further and allow an AI agent to pay for the transaction. Is that correct? Yeah, so we work with the machine payment protocol from BNB Chain, which allows users to sign a gasless transaction. And then we process the actual payment through Binance Pay. Yeah, so we basically provide the hotel inventory and we work with BNB chain through the machine payment protocol and then with Binance chain for the settlement. So users can just pay from their crypto wallets with USDT on BNB Chain, for example. Why was BNB Chain and Binance Pay the right partner for this? So we launched back in June our Travala Travel MCP with Base, which was more towards developers and builders in the industry. So you could actually build an AI agent paying with USDC on Base and shopped into our travel MCP. Now we wanted to create a consumer-based app and for that we chose BNB Chain. Obviously, we've been working with Binance for a long time and it just made more sense for us to have this consumer app built with them. The machine payment protocol, obviously, with the SDK is a great technology for us. It allows users to seamlessly make payments and don't have to pay any transaction fees. So when they authorize their wallet, for example, through their permit to protocol, and then it's all settled through Binance Pay, which has this, you know, payment-grade infrastructure. Walk me through the traveler's experience. I go to Travala.com, I go to book a hotel. What am I experiencing as I interact with agents to get this transaction done? It's pretty amazing. It's literally like talking to a person that, you know, that's all the work for you. So you basically say, hey, I want to book a hotel in Singapore for two people. You can ask any sort of questions. I want it near this location or I want to make sure that the room has X amenities and the agent is going to give you all the hotel options. Then you choose the hotel that you want and it gives you the options of the rooms that you can book. And then once you select the room, you basically connect your wallet and the agent does all the work for you. A key important part as well is that while you're doing so, you're never exposing your private keys. So, you know, the agent does all the work for you. You keep your keys. It's something that we say internally to make sure that it is not only gasless, it's also very, very secure for consumers to use. But it's literally like having a conversation with another human that that's all the work for you to find you the best hotel in any destination around the world if you're serious about crypto investing you need more than headlines you need research you can trust that's the stack the blog where grayscale's research team breaks down what's actually driving digital assets from Bitcoin and Ethereum to the emerging trends shaping what's next no hype just sharp analysis and insights from the team that's been navigating crypto markets since 2013 visit grayscale.com slash the stack and subscribe today. As digital assets continue to evolve, investors need more than on-chain data. They need insights into the risks behind the transaction. That's why S&P Global Ratings launched Vault Risk Assessment, or VRA, a new analytical approach designed for digital asset lending vaults. 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CoinDesk data and indices turns fragmented market data into institutional grade data reference rates and regulated indices benchmarks used to price markets and build financial products trusted by institutions for more than a decade CoinDesk data and indices build on the market standard for some people who are just learning about agentic payments when i talk to them one of the biggest concerns i hear is you know what if i give the agent access to my credit card or my bank account or my wallet and the ai agent makes a purchase that wasn't authorized how are users authorizing the agent to make payments on their behalf yeah so this is one of the beauties of the product um obviously you have to authorize every payment um every payment is time limited and limited by amounts that you authorize as well and the private keys are never exposed so it's protected by code let's say that you know the security is there when users authorize what can be spent and they also always need to, you know, approve the final payment. So, yeah, security is top when it comes to, you know, using this travel AI agent. When I think about my travel, I love to collect points. I love to game the credit card points. And when I think about agentic payments using crypto rails, I feel like that goes away. So talk to me a little bit about your user base. Are you hearing that people are missing that part of booking travel? And is there a plan for Travala to launch products that are similar to that experience that we have in Web2? Yeah, so Travala has AVA Smart Program membership, which is powered by our native utility token AVA. We have over 170,000 members there that basically receive rewards in the form of givebacks every time they make a booking on the platform. With this AI travel agent, we're offering an initial promotion of up to 10% back for the first booking, which is paid back in BNB and AVA, the token of the platform. So, yeah, for us, compared to web 2 traditional platforms, the traditional OTAs, what we do is offer a very transparent and liquid reward program through our AVA smart program powered by the AVA token, which gives users back for every trip they make. And this is both humans and AI agents. So, yeah, definitely a very competitive rewards program through our native AVA token. Who's the target customer for you? Are you targeting a more of a crypto-native audience, or do you hope that this product eventually hits more of a mainstream audience using some of those Web2 platforms that offer some of the rewards that I was talking about just now? Yeah, a bit of both. So we've been building on the agentic commerce area for the better part of this year. So we launched the travel MCP for developers and more heavy crypto users and perhaps those that are actually building their own agents, whether it's through Claude or an agent that they're building themselves. And now we have this consumer app. We believe that this consumer app is really for anyone that has any wallet, basically MetaMask or whatever, and can actually go and tap into these exclusive rewards through the AVA token, but also the security and the simplicity of just having a conversation to book a hotel. Travala partners with a lot of the big established travel brands like Skyscanner and Trivago and so on. So we do bring a lot of web 2 consumers into the Travala ecosystem. So we're hoping that over time they get more used to being able to book through an agent And hopefully they realize that, you know, the crypto payment rails have really been made for AI agents. So it is a lot easier. As I said, no need of creating accounts, downloading apps, using credit cards. You basically just, you know, book with your wallet. You authorize the payment and you're done. You receive a confirmation on chain and your booking is confirmed. And just before I let you go, just dig into that a little bit deeper for me. Is the future that you are building towards one where agents are using crypto rails and not so much humans anymore? Yeah, I mean, we are building the foundations for that. We launched the AI travel agent with hotels, 2.2 million hotels globally. We are planning to expand the offering to flights and then activities and car rentals, which users can already book on Traveller.com now with crypto and credit cards. But eventually, we want to have a product offering that allows any agent anywhere in the world to access any trip, whether it's hotels, flights, activities, or car rentals, just like users do nowadays. All right, Juan, we got to leave it there. It was a pleasure having you on Markets Outlook. Thank you.