Visa and blockchain data firm Artemis expect card networks and stablecoins to work side by side as AI agents handle more payments. In a joint report this week, the two argue that each rail should do the job it does best rather than compete for the same transactions.
The report, “Agentic Payments from the Ground Up,” splits AI-driven commerce, or agentic payments, into two needs. Card networks keep handling consumer purchases, while stablecoins take on the small, frequent transfers that run between software programs.
Investor Takeaway
Rather than fighting stablecoins, Visa is building a future where both payment rails coexist and grow together.
Two Rails for Two Jobs
The report divides the new market into macro-commerce and micro-commerce. Macro-commerce covers everyday purchases such as booking travel or paying for a subscription, where an AI agent buys for a person while the micro-commerce covers small, repeated payments under a dollar between programs, such as an API call or computing power. Card rails still handle bigger purchases well, the report says, but fixed fees make tiny payments too costly to process whereas newer blockchains have cut settlement costs to fractions of a cent, a better fit for machine transactions.
Onchain data backs the split, and the report follows two software payment systems launched over the past year, including x402, from Coinbase and Cloudflare and now run by the Linux Foundation, and the Machine Payments Protocol, built by Stripe and Tempo with Visa.
Stripped of test activity, x402 has handled about $15 million across 109.6 million payments since May 2025, mostly on Base, Solana and Polygon. The Machine Payments Protocol settled about $25,000 across 115,000 payments in its first weeks. Each transfer sits well under a dollar, too small for a fixed card fee to justify. Visa and Artemis expect one AI task to use both a card for the purchase and stablecoins for the smaller sums behind it.
Investor Takeaway
Visa’s thesis suggests the future of payments is hybrid, with cards handling consumer spending and stablecoins powering machine-to-machine commerce.
Where the Rules Fall Short
The report says the line between card and crypto systems is fading, as card efforts such as the Trusted Agent Protocol, the Agent Payments Protocol and Visa Intelligent Commerce add stablecoin support and crypto projects adopt the trust and identity checks cards have long used. Who pays when something goes wrong is still unsettled, as no current law says who is responsible when an AI agent buys on its own. Chargeback and dispute rules were built for people shopping at human speed, the report adds, not software running thousands of payments an hour.
Visa has moved deeper into AI and stablecoins ahead of the report. At June’s Payments Forum, it tied Intelligent Commerce to an OpenAI deal, enabling ChatGPT agents buy items and reported about $7 billion a year in stablecoin settlement, days after joining Mastercard, Coinbase and 140-plus firms in the Open Standard consortium behind Open USD. The shift reaches past card firms, with Binance aiming its next growth push at payments over trading and Interactive Brokers adding two-way stablecoin transfers this month.
