Editor's Note: Whether stablecoins will replace Visa and Mastercard has been a recurring topic of discussion in the crypto industry. The author, Noah Levine, believes this debate may be missing the point. Rather than challenging card networks, stablecoins are more likely to serve new types of merchants that the traditional payment system cannot yet cover.

As AI programming tools lower the barrier to software development, more "temporary" and "micro" services are emerging: no corporate entity, no website, no long-term operational history, yet capable of conducting high-frequency transactions between machines. Before the traditional payment system can establish risk assessment and onboarding mechanisms, these new merchants often struggle to obtain card payment capabilities.

In this institutional gap, stablecoins may first become an infrastructure. They are not replacing existing payment networks but filling the commercial scenarios that have not yet been covered. Understanding this may be closer to the true logic of this payment transformation than debating "who will replace whom."

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The Wrong Battlefield

A few weeks ago, an article by Citrini Research suggested that stablecoins would "disintermediate" Visa and Mastercard, causing a market stir and a sharp drop in the stocks of related card organizations. The crypto community cheered on social media. The argument sounds logical: AI agents will optimize every transaction, card swipe fees are just a "tax," and stablecoins can bypass them. I work in the crypto industry every day and wish this were true, but in fact, most of it is wrong.

The reason is not that stablecoins are unimportant, but that the real opportunity does not lie in replacing card payments. The real opportunity lies with merchants who will struggle to access the card system in the future.

Card Networks Will Still Win Most Battles

Citrini's argument is based on the assumption that AI agents, unbound by human habits, will proactively optimize away swipe fees.

But card networks are not just tools for "transferring funds." They also provide:

· Unsecured credit

· Pre-authorization for uncertain transactions

· Fraud protection and chargeback mechanisms

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

A simple example: If your AI agent books a hotel for you, but the actual experience is completely different from the description, with a credit card, you can dispute the charge and request a chargeback; with a stablecoin payment, the money is essentially irreversibly transferred.

The reality is:

· 82% of Americans hold reward credit cards

· There are about 18 billion cards in circulation globally

For most consumer scenarios, users will not voluntarily give up: purchase protection, reward points, for a payment method that is both irreversible and offers no additional benefits.

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

Common Arguments for "Stablecoins Will Win" Are Flawed

Opponents often cite more specific scenarios, but the conclusion usually faces the same issues. Micropayments are often seen as a weakness of the card system. But card networks have repeatedly faced transaction scenarios "unsuitable for card payments" in the past and have adapted their products.

For example: Visa has processed 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 cards." But AI agents are essentially just new devices. Your phone, watch, and computer can all hold different payment tokens pointing to the same card, which is the technology used by Apple Pay. The phone itself does not complete KYC; it merely 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 the pilot phase

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

For existing merchants and consumers, card networks will likely continue to dominate commercial payments in the era of AI agents.

The real opportunity for stablecoins lies elsewhere.

Those "Non-Existent Merchants"

Every technological platform shift creates a wave of new merchants that the old payment system cannot serve.

This pattern has repeated throughout history:

· When eBay enabled transactions between individuals, these sellers struggled to obtain merchant accounts, so PayPal served them and quickly grew into a platform with millions of users

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

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

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

AI Is Creating These Merchants at a Faster Pace

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: a quarter of the companies had over 95% of their code generated by AI; on the AI programming platform Bolt.new: 67% of the 5 million users are not developers.

This means: Millions of people who could not write production code before are now releasing software. They are simultaneously: buyers of development tools, sellers of new software services. And these transactions often happen via command line, not sales meetings.

The "Vibe Coder" Economy

Imagine this scenario: A vibe coder uses AI programming tools to spend four hours developing an API that displays financial data of public companies. This project may have: no website, no terms of service, no corporate entity. But another developer's AI agent calls it 40,000 times in a week, charging $0.001 per call, for a total revenue of $40. No one ever visits a checkout page.

I see tools like this being born every week, and the first question these developers almost always ask is: "How do I get paid?"

And the answer right now is often: They can't.

Structural Barriers in the Traditional Payment System

Existing payment processors struggle to onboard these merchants not because of technical limitations, but because of the risk structure.

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

· If the merchant commits fraud

· If there are a large number of chargebacks

The processor must bear the responsibility. Therefore, processors only approve merchants that can be underwritten.

And an API service with: no website, no corporate entity, no operational history, is difficult to pass this review.

The system isn't broken; it just wasn't designed for this scenario.

Stablecoins Fill This Gap

Payment processors may adapt to this change in the future. They have done so historically, for example, by creating new risk tiers for platform-based merchants.

But this process is slow. It took 16 years from PayPal's founding for the industry to establish Payment Facilitator risk rules. And these new merchants need to get paid now.

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

For example:

The x402 protocol already allows stablecoin payments to be embedded directly in HTTP requests

· No merchant account needed

· No payment processor needed

· No review needed

· And no chargeback risk

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

Stablecoins aren't replacing cards; they are replacing "nothing."

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

What Will Happen

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

But the pattern remains the same:

Merchants appear first

Risk underwriting systems follow later

In the time gap between these two, stablecoins become the infrastructure.

Card networks serve: all merchants that can be underwritten by payment processors.

Stablecoins serve: all merchants that cannot be underwritten.

The next wave of business models will likely be born in the gap between these two.