A few weeks ago, an article published by Citrini Research claimed that stablecoins would bypass Visa and Mastercard, directly causing a sharp drop in the stock prices of card networks. The crypto community cheered.
This logic sounds clear: AI agents will optimize every transaction, processing fees are a form of 'tax,' and stablecoins can bypass it.
I spend all day in the crypto space, and I wish this narrative were true, but most of it is wrong.
It's not that stablecoins aren't important, but because the real opportunity isn't about replacing card payments; it's about serving merchants who struggle to access traditional card payment systems.
Card Networks Will Capture the Vast Majority of the Market
Citrini's argument is based on an assumption: AI agents, free from human habits, will proactively optimize away card network fees.
But card payments are more than just transfer tools. They offer unsecured credit, pre-authorize uncertain transactions, and provide fraud protection through chargeback rights.
Stablecoins can transfer value, but they can't do the rest.
Imagine your AI agent books a hotel for you, but it turns out to be nothing like the pictures.
With a card, you can dispute the charge and get your money back.
With a stablecoin, once the money is sent, it's gone.
82% of Americans hold rewards credit cards (referring to credit card perks like cashback, points, airline miles, hotel points, etc.), and there are over 18 billion cards in circulation globally.
For the vast majority of transactions, consumers won't voluntarily give up consumer protections and rewards to choose a payment method that offers neither benefits nor reversibility.
Fraud detection is another huge advantage of card networks: they can run models on billions of transactions in real-time.
Stablecoins currently lack a network-level anti-fraud layer that can compare.
Micropayments are often cited as a weakness of card payments, but card networks have long adapted to handle such mismatched transactions.
Visa, for example, processes over 2 billion transit ticketing transactions by aggregating multiple taps into a daily settlement.
The card industry has never abandoned any type of transaction; it always invents new products to cover them.
Another质疑 is: "But agents can't hold cards."
But agents are essentially just new devices.
Your phone, watch, and computer all hold independent tokens pointing to the same card, just like Apple Pay.
Your phone never did KYC; it just holds your token. Agents will be the same.
Visa has issued over 16 billion tokens. Agents will use these tokens.
Visa's Smart Commerce framework is in pilot, and Mastercard's Agent Pay is already live for all US cardholders.
The agent commerce protocol built by Stripe and OpenAI is already integrated with Etsy, with over a million Shopify merchants coming soon.
The conclusion is clear:
For existing merchants and consumers, card payments are almost certain to dominate agent commerce.
The opportunity for stablecoins lies elsewhere—with the merchants that haven't emerged yet.
Those Merchants That Haven't Emerged Yet
Every platform shift催生s a wave of merchants that existing payment systems cannot serve.
When eBay emerged, individual sellers couldn't get merchant accounts; PayPal served them.
Shopify grew from 42,000 merchants to 5.5 million in 13 years.
When Stripe was founded, many of its clients hadn't even been born yet.
The pattern has always been consistent: the winners serve merchants that incumbents cannot underwrite.
The AI wave will催生 such merchants faster than any previous platform shift.
Last year alone, 36 million new developers joined GitHub.
In the YC Winter 2025 batch, a quarter of the companies had codebases with over 95% AI-written code.
On the popular AI coding platform Bolt.new, 67% of its 5 million users aren't developers at all.
People who couldn't write production-level code two years ago are now shipping software.
They are both buyers of developer services and, simultaneously, sellers.
Imagine this:
An average developer uses AI tools to spend 4 hours building a tool that displays financial data for public companies. No website, no terms of service, no legal entity.
Another developer's agent calls it 40,000 times a week, at $0.001 per call, generating $40 in revenue. No one ever clicks a checkout page.
I see developers building tools like this every week.
Their first question is always: How do I get paid?
For most, the answer is: Right now, you can't.
Existing payment providers struggle to onboard these merchants.
It's not a technical problem; it's that payment providers, once they onboard a merchant, assume their risk.
If the merchant commits fraud or generates a lot of chargebacks, the payment provider is on the hook.
A tool with no website, no entity, and no record has almost no chance of passing risk review.
The system is working as designed; it just wasn't designed for this.
Payment providers could adapt, and they have before.
But it took PayPal 16 years from launch to the industry's first underwriting guidelines for payment service providers.
And these new merchants need to get paid now.
For them, accepting stablecoins is like a street vendor only taking cash.
It's not that cash is better, but this type of merchant has historically struggled to get approved for card acceptance.
In this gap, stablecoins are currently the only viable option.
Even with rough wallet experiences and regulatory frameworks still forming, protocols like x402 can already embed stablecoin payments directly into HTTP requests:
No merchant account needed, no processor, no onboarding, no chargeback liability.
These merchants aren't choosing between stablecoins and card payments.
They are choosing between stablecoins and not getting paid at all.
New Commerce Will Be Born Here
Every wave of new merchants eventually gets absorbed by traditional payment systems, and this time will likely be no different.
But the sequence is always: merchants emerge first, risk management follows.
In the gap between these two periods, stablecoins are the infrastructure.
· Card payments serve all merchants that payment providers can underwrite;
· Stablecoins serve all merchants that payment providers cannot underwrite.
The next wave of commerce will be born in this gap.
