Experts from the Visa payment system and the Artemis analytical company have come to an important conclusion. They believe that bank cards and stablecoins will occupy completely different niches. We are talking about future payments made by autonomous AI agents. The authors of the study clearly identified two main categories of such financial transactions. The first category includes purchases on a person's direct order. This includes booking trips, managing subscriptions, and custom ordering of goods. These transactions are very similar to standard online trading. Therefore, they can safely pass through the usual payment cards. The second category is frequent transfers of less than one dollar between programs. For example, an AI agent can pay for individual requests to online services. It also involves paying for computing power or using specialized software tools.

According to Visa, fixed fees make the card infrastructure extremely unprofitable for micropayments. In the Base and Solana networks, the fees for conducting such transactions are only fractions of a cent. The report examines two open payment protocols in detail. The first x402 protocol shows the main activity in the Base, Solana and Polygon networks. The second machine payment protocol supports settlements both through blockchains and through traditional systems. The authors allow for the creation of a convenient hybrid payment model. In it, the cards are used for authorization and large purchases on behalf of people. And stablecoins are used for instant payments between programs. According to Artemis, about $15 million passed through the x402 protocol. This happened in the framework of almost 110 million transactions after excluding test operations.

The authors of the study named the issue of trust and responsibility as the main unresolved problem. It is still completely unclear who should be responsible for the erroneous or unauthorized purchase. The owner of the AI agent, the platform operator, or the model developer may be to blame. The existing refund rules are initially designed exclusively for human transactions. There is simply no well-established mechanism for challenging thousands of automatic transactions per hour. Malicious instructions pose an additional serious risk. They are able to redirect the payment or force the AI agent to make an unplanned purchase. Previously, analysts had already excluded fictitious transactions from the statistics of the x402 protocol. After such filtering, the volume of transactions turned out to be significantly lower than the initial estimates. In June, Alchemy and Visa launched the AgentCard service for secure purchases.

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The material has been prepared solely for informational purposes and does not constitute financial advice or recommendation.