AWS for Industries Coins in Motion: Building agentic blockchain payments for in-vehicle experiences Agentic blockchain-based payments are poised to transform in-vehicle driving experiences. As vehicles become increasingly connected and autonomous, they are evolving from passive transportation tools into active economic agents capable of conducting their own financial transactions [see HBR Article, 2021]. Imagine your car automatically paying for highway tolls, electric charging sessions, parking fees, or even purchasing real-time traffic data, all without human intervention. In this post, we describe how this vision can become reality through blockchain-based micro-payment systems that enable vehicles to transact autonomously, efficiently, and securely. Specifically, we introduce a solution design and show how this can be applied to implement three exemplary use cases, namely agentic 1/ road toll, 2/ vehicle charging, and 3/ in-vehicle entertainment payments. Traditional payment infrastructure was never designed for the machine economy. Credit card processors charge 2–3% per transaction, making payments under a few dollars economically unviable. Banks operate on business-day schedules with settlement times measured in hours or days, creating friction for time-sensitive transactions. These limitations have constrained innovation in connected mobility services, forcing providers to bundle charges or require prepayment, both creating poor user experiences. Blockchain technology fundamentally re-imagines this paradigm and enables various use cases such as micro-payments, shopping agents, and bot-to-bot payments as depicted in Figure 1. By using stablecoins [see e.g. HBR Article, 2024] – digital currencies pegged to fiat money like dollars or euros – vehicles can conduct micro-payments with transaction costs measured in cents rather than percentages. A car can pay $0.15 for 5 minutes of parking or $0.03 for a single toll crossing, with fees that make such granular transactions economically sensible for the first time. Foundational concepts Understanding how blockchain technology enables this payment transformation requires grasping several interconnected concepts: Distributed ledger: