The true opportunity for stablecoins is not to eliminate Visa

Agentic Commerce Won’t Kill Cards, But It’ll Open a Gap

Author: @nlevine19 Translation: Peggy, BlockBeats

Original Author: Rhythm BlockBeats

Original Source:

Repost: Mars Finance

Editor’s Note: Whether stablecoins will replace Visa and Mastercard has been a recurring topic in the crypto industry. The author, Noah Levine, believes that this debate may be missing the point. Instead of challenging the card network, stablecoins will primarily serve new types of merchants that traditional payment systems cannot yet cover.

As AI programming tools lower the barriers to software development, more “temporary” and “micro” services are emerging: no company entity, no website, and no long-term operating record, yet capable of high-frequency transactions between machines. Before risk assessment and access mechanisms are established in traditional payment systems, these new merchants often cannot obtain bank card payment capabilities.

In this regulatory gap, stablecoins may first become a foundational infrastructure. They are not meant to replace existing payment networks but to fill in the commercial scenarios that are still uncovered. Understanding this may be closer to the true logic of this payment revolution than debating “who will replace whom.”

Below is the original article:

The Wrong Battlefield

A few weeks ago, Citrini Research published an article suggesting that stablecoins would pose a “disintermediation” challenge to Visa and Mastercard. This view briefly caused market turbulence, with related card company stocks plummeting. The crypto community cheered on social media. The argument sounds logical: AI agents will optimize every transaction, and card swipe fees are just a “tax,” which stablecoins can bypass. I work in crypto daily and hope this is true, but in reality, most of it is wrong.

The reason isn’t that stablecoins are unimportant, but that the real opportunity isn’t in replacing bank cards. The true opportunity lies with merchants that will be difficult to connect to bank card systems in the future.

Bank Cards Will Still Win Most of the Battle

Citrini’s argument is based on an assumption: AI agents won’t be bound by human habits and will proactively eliminate swipe fees.

But the bank card network isn’t just a “fund transfer” tool. It also provides:

· Unsecured credit

· Pre-authorization for uncertain transactions

· Fraud protection and chargeback mechanisms

Stablecoins can indeed transfer funds, but currently, they cannot support these functions.

For example: if your AI agent books a hotel for you, but the actual experience differs completely from the description, you can dispute the charge and request a chargeback with a credit card; but if you pay with stablecoins, the money is essentially irreversibly transferred.

The reality is:

· 82% of Americans hold credit cards with rewards

· About 1.8 billion bank cards are in circulation worldwide

For most consumer scenarios, users won’t voluntarily give up these benefits: shopping protections, points rewards, in exchange for a payment method that is irreversible and offers no additional benefits.

Fraud detection further widens this gap. Bank card networks can run risk models in real-time across billions of transactions globally, while stablecoins currently lack a similar network-level anti-fraud system.

The Common Argument That “Stablecoins Will Win” Is Actually Flawed

Opponents often present more specific scenarios, but the conclusion still revolves around the same core issue. Micro-payments are often seen as a weakness of the bank card system. But the card network has faced “unsuitable for swipe” scenarios before and has continuously adapted its products.

For example: Visa has handled over 2 billion public transportation payments by consolidating multiple swipes into daily settlements. The card industry has never truly abandoned any transaction category. Instead, it always designs new products to cover these scenarios.

Another common argument is: “AI agents cannot hold bank cards.” But AI agents are essentially just new devices. Your phone, watch, or computer can hold different payment tokens pointing to the same card, which is the technology behind Apple Pay. The device itself doesn’t complete KYC; it just carries your payment token.

AI agents can do the same.

In fact:

· Visa has issued over 16 billion payment tokens

· Visa’s Intelligent Commerce framework is already in pilot

· Mastercard’s Agent Pay is open to all US cardholders

Meanwhile, the Agentic Commerce Protocol built by Stripe and OpenAI is live, Etsy has integrated it, and over 1 million Shopify merchants are preparing to adopt.

For existing merchants and consumers, bank card networks are likely to continue dominating business payments in the AI agent era.

The True Opportunity for Stablecoins Is Elsewhere

The “non-existent” merchants

Every technological platform shift creates a new class of merchants that traditional payment systems cannot serve.

This pattern has repeated throughout history:

· When eBay enabled peer-to-peer transactions, these sellers struggled to get merchant accounts, so PayPal provided services and quickly grew into a platform with millions of users.

· Shopify grew from 42,000 merchants to 5.5 million over 13 years.

As investors Alex Rampell and James da Costa pointed out: When Stripe was founded, many of its future clients didn’t even exist yet.

The rule of the payments industry has always been simple: winners serve those new merchants that traditional institutions are unable to risk.

AI is accelerating the creation of these merchants

The AI wave may create these new merchants at an unprecedented speed.

In the past year: 36 million developers joined GitHub; in Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 startup batch, over 95% of code from a quarter of the companies was AI-generated; on the AI programming platform Bolt.new, 67% of 5 million users are not developers.

This means: millions of people who previously couldn’t write production code are now releasing software. They are also: buyers of development tools, sellers of new software services. And these transactions are often completed via command line, not sales meetings.

The “Vibe Coder” Economy

Imagine a scenario: a vibe coder uses AI programming tools to develop an API in four hours for displaying publicly listed company financial data. This project might have no website, no terms of service, no company entity. But another developer’s AI agent calls it 40,000 times in a week, charging $0.001 per call, earning $40. No one visits a checkout page.

I see similar tools emerging weekly, and the first question these developers ask is almost always: “How do I get paid?”

And the current answer is often: they can’t.

Structural Barriers in Traditional Payment Systems

Existing payment processors find it difficult to onboard these merchants, not because of technical issues, but because of risk structures.

When a payment processor allows a merchant to connect, it essentially assumes the merchant’s risk:

· If the merchant commits fraud

· If there are大量拒付

The processor must bear responsibility. Therefore, they only approve merchants that can be risk-assessed.

But an API service without a website, entity, or operating history is hard to pass such assessments.

It’s not a system error; it’s just not designed for this scenario.

Stablecoins Fill This Gap

Future payment processors might adapt to this change. Historically, they have made similar adjustments, such as creating new risk tiers for platform-based merchants.

But this process is slow. It took 16 years from PayPal’s founding to the industry establishing Payment Facilitator risk rules. And these new merchants need to receive payments now.

For them, accepting stablecoins is like a street vendor only accepting cash—not because cash is better, but because their identity is hard to verify through the bank card system.

For example:

x402 Protocol can embed stablecoin payments directly into HTTP requests

· No merchant account needed

· No payment processor needed

· No approval required

· No chargeback risk

This doesn’t require people to believe stablecoins are better than bank cards. It only requires one fact: the traditional payment system hasn’t yet adapted to these merchants.

Stablecoins Are Not Replacing Bank Cards, But Replacing “Nothing”

These new merchants won’t choose between stablecoins and bank cards. Their choice is: stablecoins, or no payment method at all.

What Will Happen

Historically, every wave of new merchants has eventually been absorbed by traditional payment systems. This time is likely no different—just a matter of time.

But the pattern remains:

Merchants appear first

Risk assessment systems follow

During this gap, stablecoins become infrastructure.

Bank card services: merchants that pass risk assessment

Stablecoin services: merchants that cannot pass

The next wave of business models will likely emerge in this gap.