Visa says stablecoins will power micro-commerce in AI agentic economy

Quick Take

• A new report from Visa and Artemis said existing card payment rails will primarily handle macro-commerce, while stablecoins will be used for micro-commerce in the agentic economy.
• Visa said it expects agentic commerce to adopt a hybrid approach that combines both card and stablecoin rails at different stages of a task.

Visa and analytics firm Artemis released a research report on Wednesday highlighting how stablecoins will facilitate micro-commerce in the age of the agentic economy.

The report, titled “Agentic Payments from the Ground Up,” examines the emergence of agentic commerce, where AI agents independently initiate and complete transactions.

A central finding concerns the role of stablecoins in the future of commerce.

The report said there will be mainly two categories of agentic commerce: macro-commerce, in which agents act on behalf of humans for consumer-sized transactions such as booking travel or managing subscriptions, and micro-commerce, which involves frequent sub-dollar payments between software systems for services such as API calls or compute resources.

While the report said traditional card rails remain well suited for macro-commerce, fixed fees associated with existing rails make sub-dollar micro-payments uneconomic. Newer blockchains have reduced settlement costs to fractions of a cent, which makes stablecoins a more viable option for such payments.

Hybrid flow

“In all likelihood, this won't come down to a choice between cards and stablecoins. Both will have a place,” Visa said. “Cards are a good fit for the proxy and macro purchases that happen inside today's merchant networks. Stablecoins suit the machine-native micropayments.”

Visa said it expects agentic commerce to integrate a hybrid flow that combines both card and stablecoin rails at different stages of a task. Such convergence is already taking place, the report said, as card-native protocols, including the Trusted Agent Protocol, Agent Payments Protocol, and Visa Intelligent Commerce, are adding stablecoin support, while crypto-native protocols incorporate elements of traditional trust infrastructure.

“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 stated that its goal is to support card-native trust and authorization alongside machine-native settlement, with interoperability between the two.

Issue of trust

Trust remains a key challenge for agentic commerce, as traditional commerce is built on the assumption that a human is making the purchase — someone with judgment who can be held legally and financially responsible.

“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 and evidence rules are designed for human-speed commerce. There is currently no settled way to reverse disputed payments when complex chains of agents transact thousands of times per hour.

Meanwhile, Visa recently joined Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, and other companies to launch Open USD (OUSD), a new stablecoin project that shares most of the earnings from its reserves.