Editor's Note: As AI Agents evolve from auxiliary tools into autonomous 'digital executors,' the payment ecosystem is also undergoing transformation. Traditional internet transactions primarily revolved around the retail process of 'user click - checkout - payment.' However, in the age of Agents, the entities conducting transactions are no longer just humans but intelligent systems capable of continuous operation and establishing long-term cooperative relationships.
This article presents a vivid analogy: Agents will not make payments like 'tourists' on a per-transaction basis but will behave more like 'locals'—completing transactions through stable supplier relationships, credit, and pre-negotiated commercial terms. In this model, traditional payment systems centered around card swiping may only handle a portion of transactions, while programmable payment tools like stablecoins are poised to play a larger role in new payment scenarios.
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Step into a marketplace. If you are a tourist, you often see a bustling scene: crowds weaving through, examining goods, comparing prices, sampling products, haggling with vendors, and pulling out coins or cards to complete transactions. It seems that every interaction is an independent business deal—an instant negotiation where trust is settled immediately through cash or cards.
But in reality, most transactions don't happen this way.
If you look more closely, you'll notice that the marketplace is mostly filled with locals. They head purposefully to familiar merchants. Restaurant owners go to their trusted butchers, fishmongers, and farmers; tailors visit repairers, weavers, and artisans. There's little haggling between them, and many transactions are even settled on credit.
When we discuss how Agents will handle payments, we often instinctively adopt the 'tourist' perspective. But Agents will behave more like locals.
The differences between Agents and humans—such as infinite replicability, flexible resource allocation, and near-zero startup costs—mean that a few Agents can establish dominance in specific domains. Even if the barrier to building Agents continues to lower, relationship networks, partnerships, and trust mechanisms will remain critical factors determining the quality of the experience.
The truly dominant Agents won't need tourist-style payment channels; they will need supplier relationships, working capital, and credit lines.
Agents will bring 'tourists' (i.e., users) along to complete transactions.
So, what will this model look like?
As Agents gradually evolve into enterprise-like platforms, their payment models will shift from retail payment networks to pre-negotiated B2B terms and credit systems. Existing payment infrastructure is not well-suited to meet this demand.
This恰恰 presents an opportunity for a new generation of payment networks, such as stablecoins. But this depends on entrepreneurs building solutions around new payment scenarios, such as Agent payments, streaming payments, and high-frequency, small-value, global commercial transactions.
This article will elaborate on this perspective in three parts: First, the key differences between Agents and humans and how these differences will shape future payment models; second, why existing payment systems fall short of meeting Agent needs; and third, the capabilities required for a new generation of payment infrastructure to succeed in future competition.
How Agents Differ from Humans
Understanding Agents and payments requires answering two questions:
1. Do Agents behave more like individuals or more like enterprises?
2. Are Agent decisions more short-term transactions or long-term collaborations?
The answer is: Agents behave more like enterprises and will establish long-term relationships.
Agents are often 'lightweight instances' built atop larger commercial systems. For example, an 'intelligent travel guide Agent' supported by a major travel platform, or a franchise operator fine-tuned for local market demand within an existing supply chain system.
Why will Agents behave like enterprises?
First, superior experiences often come from advance design, not on-the-spot negotiation.
Users do not want their Agent to start comparing prices, contacting merchants, or renegotiating terms at checkout. The ideal Agent should have already done this work: it knows which suppliers are reliable, prices are already agreed upon, and it can directly complete the transaction.
This is a commercial relationship, not a tourist-style one-off transaction.
In fact, similar models already exist in human society. Travel agents, literary agents, talent agents, watch dealers, and real estate agents are all types of 'Agents.' These agents establish long-term relationships with publishers, production companies, watch distributors, or lending institutions, and each transaction is customized atop this foundation.
Second, Agents can be infinitely replicated, but the advantages of scaled enterprises cannot be copied.
The most successful Agents will leverage the advantages of scale: lower computing costs, better supplier prices, deeper system integration, and more stable technical components.
Scale reinforces scale. A travel agent booking a million airline tickets a year will inevitably get better terms from airlines than an agent booking only ten tickets a year.
This trend is already emerging. Only products like ChatGPT have sufficient user distribution to establish partnerships with platforms like Shopify, Amazon, and Expedia. Small startups often have to rely on automated browsers or reverse API interfaces while bearing retail-level fee structures.
This is also why Agents will ultimately become centralized, or at least most Agents will be built on large platforms.
Agents themselves are easy to develop, but economic principles dictate that only a few core Agents will emerge in each vertical domain, possessing deep supplier relationships and able to use profits to continuously optimize the experience.
Meanwhile, specialized Agents in vertical domains can also collaborate with user-side Agents to provide more complete services.
Two Types of Payment Relationships
If Agents behave more like enterprises, then two types of payment relationships need to be designed: User → Agent; Agent (or Agent platform) → Supplier
Users pay the Agent, potentially in various ways: subscription fees, per-task fees, credit lines, authorizing the Agent to use the user's account
The Agent, in turn, pays suppliers through B2B terms, such as: pre-negotiated prices, bulk discounts, Net-30 invoices, sub-agent settlements
Judging from the structure of current corporate spending, Agents will still occasionally use retail payment channels, but this will only constitute a small fraction of overall expenditure.
In fact, this is quite similar to today's credit card system. Card issuers establish retail relationships with consumers, bearing risk and providing credit and rewards; while acquirers establish commercial relationships with merchants, completing transactions through negotiated fees, scaled settlements, and working capital arrangements.
Agents and Credit Cards: A Seeming Fit
Many believe that credit cards are actually a quite suitable payment tool for Agents.
Reasons include: global acceptance, suitability for the $20 to $1000 transaction range, built-in arbitration and chargeback mechanisms, provision of monthly statements. Monthly statements are particularly important as they help users understand their spending.
In the future, when Agents replace kids and iPads as the primary source of 'surprise bills,' this may become even more crucial.
But two problems exist in reality: 1. Credit card technology is not suitable for Agent scenarios; 2. The fee model of credit cards traps the industry in a classic 'innovator's dilemma.'
Credit Card Technology is Difficult to Upgrade
Almost all credit card systems default to human involvement: human approval, user interface interaction, traditional payment types (one-time or subscription).
Virtual card technologies like Stripe Link and Visa 3D took over 15 years to mature. But the development speed of Agents far outpaces the upgrade rhythm of payment infrastructure. Thousands of PSPs, POS systems, merchant backends, and client interfaces cannot be adapted in a short time.
Credit Cards Cannot Cover Extreme Payment Scenarios
For example: an Agent making real-time streaming payments to a compute service provider, or an Agent paying micro-fees for API calls—these transactions are difficult to execute via credit card.
The reason is simple: Visa does not support transactions below $0.01; the credit card economic model relies on a fixed fee of around $0.30.
Technically, Visa could support micropayments, but this would directly impact its business model. More complex is that Agent payment scenarios often fall outside the traditional value range of credit cards. For instance, many early Agent scenarios involve API service fees, which are difficult to refund or resell. Credit cards can still play a role, but the innovator's dilemma often limits the pace of change in established systems.
Traditional Payments Still Have a Role
As Agent platforms gradually evolve into enterprise-like systems, a large amount of high-frequency spending will be handled through B2B terms: invoices, Net-30, discounts, credit lines.
In this model, the 'payment network' itself is not critical. Settlement might happen via wire transfer, ACH, or batch transfer. Traditional payments remain effective in mature commercial relationships. But Agents will not exist solely in this environment.
Agents are emerging rapidly, and they often operate in scenarios where traditional payments are least efficient: first-time partnerships, cross-border payments, complex reconciliation, new Agent-Vendor models, instant payments, micro-loans.
In these scenarios, stablecoins are a superior payment tool. More importantly, building new features on programmable money is far easier than on traditional payment infrastructure.
Once new commercial relationships are established on stablecoins, they tend to maintain this form long-term. Over time, the proportion of stablecoins in the payment system is likely to continuously increase.
Opportunities for New Payment Technologies
Stablecoins are essentially a new financial platform.
They possess the following characteristics: faster, lower cost, globally available, backed 1:1 by high-quality liquid assets.
More crucially, stablecoins are programmable. Functions like arbitration, billing, credit, escrow, and conditional payments can all be flexibly implemented within the same system.
Compared to banks or credit cards, stablecoin payments are easier to embed into: APIs, databases, Agent checkout flows.
This significantly simplifies reconciliation, approval, and system integration processes, which is particularly important for entrepreneurs building Agent commercial ecosystems.
Economically, stablecoins also solve the efficiency problems credit cards face on both ends: no $0.30 minimum fee, large transfers aren't eroded by interchange fees.
Therefore, whether it's: an Agent paying $0.001 per second for compute, or a business settling a $50,000 supplier invoice, the same payment network can be used.
Building More Stablecoin Infrastructure
A common objection is: the on/off ramp costs for stablecoins are high.
For the 'tourist,' this is indeed a problem. But when users have an Agent acting as a 'guide,' this friction rapidly decreases.
Agents can help users complete currency exchange and only execute necessary transactions, thereby saving fees. If combined with billing and arbitration mechanisms, we approach a complete system.
Imagine a scenario: a user browses multiple brands in a department store, selects goods, and finally checks out just once. The store backend is responsible for distributing funds to the various merchants. Agents will need a similar model. The user sees: 'Your Agent wants to book a flight, hotel, and rent a car for you.' Not three separate checkout flows.
The Agent platform handles supplier relationships, and the user only needs to confirm the transaction intent.
Conclusion
Agents will not pay like tourists. They will transact like locals, through relationships, credit, and long-term collaboration. This means the true scale of future payments will flow through pre-negotiated B2B terms, not card swipes.
But we are currently in a critical window. Agents are emerging, entrepreneurs are building new commercial systems, and they need payment tools they can use today.
Credit cards are not ready: micropayments are too costly, reconciliation is complex, technical debt is heavy, reliance on manual risk control.
Stablecoins, however, are ready. They are programmable, global, easy to integrate, and can support Agent payments from day one.
Payment relationships exhibit strong path dependency. Once new commercial relationships are built on stablecoins, they tend to persist long-term. In the coming years, as the ecosystem matures and on/off ramp friction decreases, a cohort of startups will build new capabilities around this infrastructure: billing systems, arbitration mechanisms, credit systems, batch approvals, and cross-system interoperability.
A new era of payments may be beginning right here.
