Visa says cards and stablecoins will coexist as AI agents drive machine-to-machine payments
Visa and blockchain analytics firm Artemis this week laid out a clear vision for payments in an AI-driven economy: traditional card rails will continue to handle consumer purchases, while low-cost stablecoins will become the go-to for high-frequency, sub-dollar machine-to-machine transactions.
The joint report, Agentic Payments from the Ground Up, argues that the rise of “agentic commerce”—AI agents autonomously initiating and completing transactions on behalf of users or other software—creates two distinct payment demands:
- Macro-commerce: consumer-sized purchases (booking travel, managing subscriptions) where card networks, merchant relationships and existing authorization flows still make the most sense.
- Micro-commerce: repeated, sub-dollar payments between services—think API calls, paying for compute or tiny per-request fees—where blockchain settlement costs have fallen to fractions of a cent and stablecoins look far more economical.
Visa’s takeaway: this isn’t an either/or choice. “Both will have a place,” the report says, with workflows likely to blend card-based payments for human-facing purchases and stablecoins for machine-native micropayments within the same extended transaction lifecycle.
Bridging the gap: industry convergence and Visa’s strategy
Visa notes the boundary between card-focused and crypto-native payments is blurring. Initiatives tied to card ecosystems—such as the Trusted Agent Protocol, Agent Payments Protocol and Visa Intelligent Commerce—are adding stablecoin support, while crypto projects are adopting trust, verification and other features historically associated with traditional payment rails.
Visa’s long-term approach, the report explains, is to pair card-based authorization and security with blockchain settlement and to enable interoperability between both systems rather than replace one with the other.
Legal and trust hurdles
Despite the technology advances, Visa flags trust and legal frameworks as major barriers. Current payment rules, chargeback mechanisms and liability models assume a human buyer; they don’t clearly allocate responsibility when AI agents autonomously complete thousands of tiny transactions per hour. Dispute processes built for human-paced commerce will need rethinking for agentic flows.
What Visa is already doing
Visa has been building tools and partnerships to prepare for agentic commerce:
- Launched Visa Intelligent Commerce and tools like an Agentic Directory and Agent Score to help vet and govern AI agents.
- Announced a partnership with OpenAI to enable secure Visa payments inside agentic commerce experiences.
- Continued investing in stablecoin settlement: Visa says its annualized stablecoin settlement run rate reached roughly $7 billion, with more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs live or under development.
- In July, joined Mastercard, Coinbase and 140+ organizations in the Open Standard consortium to issue an Open USD stablecoin for business payments and settlements.
- Recently teamed with HashKey Exchange and Shanghai Commercial Bank to launch a Hong Kong co-branded credit card that lets eligible users convert card rewards into vouchers redeemable for crypto purchases or trading fees on the licensed exchange.
Why it matters
As AI agents become more autonomous and transaction volumes rise, payment infrastructure must support both large consumer buys and high-volume micropayments. Visa’s report argues that a hybrid approach—cards for human-facing purchases and stablecoins for machine-native micropayments, tied together by interoperable standards and strengthened trust tooling—will be key to scaling agentic commerce safely and efficiently.
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