Visa says the future of machine-driven commerce will run on both cards and stablecoins — working together rather than replacing one another.
In a new joint report with blockchain analytics firm Artemis, titled Agentic Payments from the Ground Up, Visa lays out how “agentic commerce” — transactions initiated and completed autonomously by AI agents acting on behalf of people or other software — will create two distinct payment needs. The company separates the market into:
- Macro-commerce: consumer-sized purchases (booking travel, managing subscriptions) where traditional card rails and existing merchant networks are well suited.
- Micro-commerce: repeated, sub-dollar transactions between software services (API calls, compute or data payments) where fixed card processing costs make tiny payments uneconomical.
The report argues that modern blockchain networks, with settlement costs cut to fractions of a cent, make stablecoins a practical and efficient choice for the micro-payments layer of the AI economy. Visa’s view: this won’t be a winner-takes-all moment. Instead, card systems will continue to serve consumer-facing flows while stablecoins pick up the high-frequency, low-value machine-native payments — and many workflows will combine both.
Visa also points to a blurring of the lines between card-focused and crypto-native systems. Initiatives such as the Trusted Agent Protocol, Agent Payments Protocol and Visa Intelligent Commerce are being extended to support stablecoins, while crypto projects increasingly adopt trust and verification features traditionally associated with card networks. Visa’s long-term approach favors combining card-based authorization and security with blockchain-based settlement, and enabling interoperability between the two.
But the path forward isn’t purely technical. Visa highlights trust and legal frameworks as major hurdles: current laws, dispute processes and chargeback rules assume a human payer and aren’t designed for AI agents capable of executing thousands of transactions per hour. Defining liability and dispute resolution for autonomous agents will be essential for adoption.
This report complements Visa’s recent product and partnership moves in the space. Earlier this year the company rolled out Visa Intelligent Commerce along with an Agentic Directory and Agent Score — tools intended to help verify and authorize AI-driven payments — and announced a partnership with OpenAI to enable secure Visa payments inside agentic commerce experiences.
Stablecoins have become a focal point of Visa’s broader payments strategy. In July Visa joined Mastercard, Coinbase and more than 140 other firms in the Open Standard consortium to issue Open USD for business payments and settlements. Visa says its stablecoin settlement run rate has reached roughly $7 billion annualized and that more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs are live or under development across its network.
Visa is also deepening retail ties between traditional cards and digital assets: this week it launched a co-branded credit card in Hong Kong with HashKey Exchange and Shanghai Commercial Bank that lets eligible users convert card rewards into vouchers redeemable for crypto purchases or trading fees on the licensed exchange.
Bottom line: as AI agents proliferate, Visa sees a hybrid ecosystem where cards handle consumer-facing commerce and stablecoins power the micro-payments that stitch together machine-to-machine workflows — provided the industry can solve the legal, trust and dispute challenges that come with autonomous transactions.
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