Visa: Stablecoins to Power Micro‑Payments in Agentic Economy

Visa and analytics firm Artemis published a report on Wednesday titled “Agentic Payments from the Ground Up” outlining how stablecoins could enable frequent sub‑dollar payments between AI agents as commerce becomes more automated. The report contrasts small, machine‑to‑machine payments with larger agent‑initiated purchases handled by existing card networks.

The report defines agentic commerce as transactions initiated and completed by autonomous software agents acting for humans. It separates the space into macro‑commerce-agent actions for consumer‑sized purchases such as booking travel or managing subscriptions-and micro‑commerce, which covers high‑volume, sub‑dollar payments for services like API calls and cloud compute.

Visa and Artemis describe current card infrastructure as well suited to proxy and macro purchases within today's merchant networks, but note fixed fees on card rails make many microtransactions uneconomic. The report points out that newer blockchains have driven settlement costs down to fractions of a cent, improving the case for using stablecoins to settle machine‑native micropayments.

The report expects a hybrid flow in which cards and stablecoins are used at different stages of an automated task rather than one rail replacing the other. “In all likelihood, this won't come down to a choice between cards and stablecoins. Both will have a place,” the report wrote. It lists emerging card‑native protocols such as the Trusted Agent Protocol, the Agent Payments Protocol and Visa Intelligent Commerce as adding stablecoin support, while crypto‑native systems are incorporating traditional trust features.

Visa describes its objective as pairing card‑native trust and authorization with machine‑native settlement to enable interoperability between the two approaches. The company added that “the line between these two camps is already getting harder to draw,” and that the systems are beginning to look more like parts of the same payment architecture.

The report highlights legal and trust challenges for automated payments. It notes existing commerce rules assume a human purchaser who can be held legally and financially responsible. “Existing legal and regulatory frameworks weren't written with this kind of delegation in mind, and clear precedents may not be available yet,” the authors wrote, adding that current chargeback windows and evidence rules do not easily apply to chains of agents transacting thousands of times per hour.

Concrete use cases in the report include metered access to APIs, pay‑as‑you‑go compute and IoT services that require very small, frequent payments. The paper also notes that Visa joined other industry participants to launch Open USD, a new stablecoin that shares most earnings from its reserves.

The report describes a mixed payments architecture combining card authorization and stablecoin settlement as a possible model for agentic commerce if settlement costs continue to fall and trust mechanisms evolve.