Original Article Title: Agentic Commerce Won't Kill Cards, But It'll Open A Gap
Original Author: @nlevine19
Translation: Peggy, BlockBeats

Editor's Note: Whether stablecoins will replace Visa and Mastercard has always been a topic of repeated discussion in the crypto industry. The author of this article, Noah Levine, believes that this debate may have missed the point. Rather than saying stablecoins are going to challenge the card networks, it's more accurate to say that they will first serve new types of merchants that the traditional payment system has not yet covered.

With AI programming tools reducing the barrier to software development, more and 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. These new merchants often struggle to obtain card payment capabilities before the traditional payment system has established risk assessment and onboarding mechanisms.

In this institutional gap, stablecoins may first serve as infrastructure. They are not intended to replace existing payment networks but to fill the gaps in business scenarios that have not yet been covered. Understanding this point may be closer to the true logic of this payment revolution than debating "who will replace whom."

Note: The author of this article, Levine, is currently an investment partner in a16z's crypto division, focusing on the intersection of crypto, payments, and financial infrastructure. Prior to joining a16z, he worked at Visa on chain strategy and data, as well as in strategy and data roles at RTFKT.

The following is the original article:

The Wrong Battlefield

A few weeks ago, a Citrini Research article suggested that stablecoins would decentralize the impact on Visa and Mastercard, causing a market stir and a significant drop in related card organization stocks. The crypto community cheered this viewpoint on social media. The argument sounds logical: AI agents will optimize every transaction, and card swipe fees are just a "tax" that stablecoins can bypass. I work in the crypto industry every day and hope this assessment is true, but in fact, much of it is wrong.

The reason is not that stablecoins are not important, but that the real opportunity is not in replacing bank cards. The real opportunity lies in those merchants who are likely to have difficulty accessing the card system in the future.

Bank Cards Will Still Win Most of the Battles

Citrini's argument is based on an assumption: AI agents are not bound by human habits and will proactively optimize away credit card processing fees.

However, credit card networks are not just a tool for "fund transfers." They also provide:

· Unsecured credit

· Pre-authorization for uncertain transactions

· Fraud protection and chargeback mechanisms

While stablecoins can indeed facilitate transfers, they currently cannot fulfill these functions.

For example, if your AI agent helps you book a hotel but the actual experience is completely different from the description, you can dispute and request a chargeback with a credit card; whereas if you pay with a stablecoin, the money is essentially irreversibly gone.

The reality is:

· 82% of Americans hold credit cards with reward points

· There are around 18 billion bank cards in global circulation

For most consumer scenarios, users will not willingly give up shopping protection, reward points, to switch to a payment method that is both irreversible and lacks additional benefits.

Fraud detection further widens this gap. Credit card networks can run risk models in real-time across billions of transactions globally, while stablecoins currently do not have a similar network-level anti-fraud system.

The Common Argument of "Stablecoins Will Win" Does Not Hold

Opponents often present more specific scenarios, but the conclusion often boils down to the same issue. Micropayments are often seen as a weakness of the credit card system. However, the credit card network has faced "non-card-present" transaction scenarios in the past and has continuously adjusted its products.

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

Another common claim is: "AI agents cannot hold a bank card." However, AI agents are fundamentally just a new device. Your phone, watch, computer can all hold different payment tokens pointing to the same card, which is the technology Apple Pay uses. The phone itself does not undergo KYC; it only carries your payment token.

AI agents could also do the same.

In fact:

·Visa has issued over 16 billion payment tokens

·Visa's Intelligent Commerce framework has entered the pilot phase

·Mastercard's Agent Pay is now available to all U.S. cardholders

Meanwhile, the Agentic Commerce Protocol built by Stripe and OpenAI has gone live, Etsy has onboarded, and over 1 million Shopify merchants are preparing to onboard.

For existing merchants and consumers, the card networks are likely to still dominate commercial payments in the AI agent era.

The real opportunity for stablecoins lies elsewhere.

Those "Merchants Who Do Not Yet Exist"

Every technological platform shift creates a cohort of new merchants that legacy payment systems cannot serve.

This pattern has repeated throughout history:

·When eBay enabled peer-to-peer transactions, these sellers struggled to access merchant accounts, so PayPal stepped in to serve them and rapidly grew into a platform with millions of users.

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

As pointed out by investors Alex Rampell and James da Costa: when Stripe was founded, many of the companies that would later become its customers did not even exist yet.

The rule of the payment industry has always been simple: winners often serve the new merchants traditional institutions cannot yet underwrite.

AI Is Creating These Merchants Faster

The AI wave may be creating these new merchants at an unprecedented pace.

In the past year: 36 million developers joined GitHub; at Y Combinator's Winter 2025 startup camp: a quarter of companies had over 95% of their code generated by AI; on the AI programming platform Bolt.new: 67% of 5 million users are non-developers.

This means: millions who couldn't write production code before are now shipping software. They are also: buyers of developer tools, sellers of new software services. And these transactions often happen via the command line, not sales meetings.

「Vibe Coder」 Economics

Imagine this scenario: a vibe coder spent four hours using an AI programming tool to develop an API that displays financial data for public companies. This project may have: no website, no terms of service, no corporate entity. However, another developer's AI agent called it 40,000 times in a week, charging 0.1 cents per call, generating a total income of $40. No one has ever visited the checkout page.

Every week, I see similar tools being created, and the first question these developers almost always ask is: "How do I get paid?"

And the answer nowadays is often: they don't.

Structural Barriers of the Traditional Payment System

Existing payment processors find it challenging to onboard these merchants, not because of inadequate technology, but due to risk structures.

When a payment processor allows a merchant to onboard, it effectively assumes that merchant's risk:

· If the merchant engages in fraud

· If there are high levels of chargebacks

The processor is liable. Therefore, processors only approve merchants who can be risk-assessed (underwritten).

And an API service with: no website, no corporate entity, and no operating history is challenging to pass through this scrutiny.

The system is not malfunctioning; it's just not designed for this scenario.

The Void Filled by Stablecoins

Payment processors may adapt to this change in the future. Historically, they have made similar adjustments, such as creating new risk levels for platform-like merchants.

But this process is slow. It took 16 years from PayPal's inception 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 accepting only cash, not because cash is superior, but because their identity is challenging to verify through the banking system.

For example:

The x402 protocol can now directly embed stablecoin payments in HTTP requests

· No need for a merchant account

·No need for a payment processor

·No need for KYC

·And no risk of chargebacks

These don’t require people to believe stablecoins are better than debit cards. Just one fact: the traditional payment system hasn’t caught up to these merchants.

Stablecoins aren’t replacing debit cards; they’re replacing “nothing”

These new merchants aren’t choosing between stablecoins and debit cards. Their choice is: stablecoins or no payment method at all.

What will happen

Historically, every wave of new merchants eventually gets absorbed by the traditional payment system. This time is likely no different, just a matter of time.

But the pattern remains the same:

Merchants come first

Risk-based KYC systems follow

And in the gap between the two, stablecoins become the infrastructure.

Debit cards serve: all merchants that can pass a payment processor’s KYC.

Stablecoins serve: all merchants unable to pass KYC.

The next wave of business models is likely incubating in the gap between the two.

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