Visa backs stablecoins for AI micro-commerce alongside cards
A new Visa report predicts AI agents will use stablecoins for sub-dollar machine payments, pointing to a converged future for crypto and traditional rails.
Visa and analytics firm Artemis released a report on Wednesday detailing how artificial intelligence agents will fragment commerce into two distinct payment channels. The research, titled "Agentic Payments from the Ground Up," argues that the emerging agentic economy will rely on a hybrid model rather than replacing existing financial infrastructure.
Under this model, traditional card networks will continue to process macro-commerce. These are consumer-sized transactions, such as booking travel or managing subscriptions, where AI acts merely as a proxy for a human buyer.
However, the report highlights that fixed fees make traditional card rails uneconomic for micro-commerce. This category involves frequent, sub-dollar machine-to-machine payments for backend services like API calls and compute resources. Because newer blockchains have reduced settlement costs to fractions of a cent, stablecoins are positioned to capture this high-volume, low-value traffic.
For investors, the significance lies in the convergence of these historically rival systems. "The line between these two camps is already getting harder to draw," Visa wrote. "If anything, the two are starting to look less like rivals and more like parts of the same system."
Visa is actively building this interoperability through card-native protocols like the Trusted Agent Protocol and Visa Intelligent Commerce, both of which are integrating stablecoin support. The company's strategic positioning is further evidenced by its recent decision to join Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock, and Coinbase in launching Open USD (OUSD). This stablecoin project distributes most of its reserve earnings to participants, giving legacy payment giants a direct financial stake in crypto settlement layers.
Despite the technological readiness, regulatory frameworks present a major obstacle. Current commerce laws assume a human with legal and financial liability is initiating a purchase. "Existing legal and regulatory frameworks weren't written with this kind of delegation in mind, and clear precedents may not be available yet," Visa said. Furthermore, existing chargeback windows are designed for human-speed transactions, leaving no settled mechanism to reverse disputed payments when complex agent chains execute thousands of trades per hour.
