How this channel uses it ## Merchant of record in context In this channel's conversation with Stripe's Emily Glassberg Sands about agentic commerce, the merchant of record sits at the center of the payment stack being rebuilt for agents: the internet assumed a person was the main actor, and as agents become a new class of internet actor, every layer — discovery, payments, identity, fraud — has to be rethought. [^90e39a1e-87e8-5b3f-b9f2-f003e83fd62b@96] The material points at concrete infrastructure that reshapes who holds the transaction and what they can see: the Agent Commerce Protocol co-created with OpenAI, shared payment tokens that pass credentials merchant-ward without the agent ever seeing them, and Stripe's Link wallet letting consumers decide which agents may request credentials and under what limits. [^90e39a1e-87e8-5b3f-b9f2-f003e83fd62b@2760] [^90e39a1e-87e8-5b3f-b9f2-f003e83fd62b@3139] - A merchant of record is the entity that carries the sale: the payment, the liability, and the obligations that come with accepting money. - In agentic commerce, keeping credentials away from the agent (shared payment tokens, wallet-controlled permissions) changes what the merchant of record must trust and verify. - Fraud defense moving up-funnel — integrated at sign-up, not just checkout — is part of the same shift in who is responsible for a transaction. [^90e39a1e-87e8-5b3f-b9f2-f003e83fd62b@619]