a16z: What Entrepreneurial Opportunities Exist in the Blue Ocean of Agent Payment Transactions?

Original Title: Agents will pay like locals, not tourists

Original Author: Sam Broner, a16zcrypto

Original Compilation: Peggy, BlockBeats

Editor's Note: As AI Agents evolve from auxiliary tools into 'digital executors' capable of autonomously completing tasks, the payment system is also undergoing changes. Past internet transactions primarily revolved around the retail process of 'user click → checkout → payment'. However, in the Agent era, the transacting parties are no longer just humans, but intelligent systems that can operate continuously and establish long-term cooperative relationships.

This article proposes a vivid analogy: Agents will not pay temporarily like 'tourists' each time, but will be more like 'locals', meaning transactions are completed through stable supplier relationships, credit, and pre-negotiated commercial terms. In this model, traditional payment systems centered around card swipes may only handle a portion of transactions, while programmable payment tools like stablecoins are expected to play a larger role in new payment scenarios.

The following is the original text:

Entering a marketplace, if you are a tourist, you often see a bustling scene: crowds weaving through, inspecting goods, comparing prices, sampling, haggling with vendors, pulling out coins or swiping cards to complete transactions. It seems each interaction is like an independent business deal. An instant negotiation, with trust settled immediately via cash or card.

But in reality, most transactions do not happen this way.

If you observe more closely, you'll find the marketplace is mostly filled with locals. They walk purposefully towards familiar merchants. Restaurant owners go to their known butcher, fishmonger, and farmer; tailors go to repairers, weavers, and artisans. They rarely haggle anymore, and many transactions are even completed directly on credit.

When we discuss how Agents will make payments, we often instinctively start from the 'tourist' perspective. But Agent behavior is more akin to that of locals.

The differences between Agents and humans, such as infinite replication, flexible resource scheduling, 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 in the future, relationship networks, partners, and trust mechanisms will still become key factors determining the quality of the experience.

The truly dominant Agents do not need tourist-style payment channels; they need supplier relationships, working capital, and lines of credit.

Agents will bring 'tourists' (i.e., users) along to complete transactions.

So, what form will this model take?

As Agents gradually evolve into enterprise-like platforms, their payment models will shift from retail payment networks (retail rails) to pre-negotiated B2B terms and credit systems. Existing payment infrastructure does not adequately meet this need.

This precisely presents an opportunity for a new generation of payment networks, such as stablecoins. But the prerequisite is that entrepreneurs can build solutions around new payment scenarios, such as Agent payments, streaming payments, and high-frequency, small-amount, globalized commercial transactions.

This article will elaborate on this viewpoint from three aspects: First, the key differences between Agents and humans, and how these differences shape future payment models; Second, why existing payment systems struggle to meet Agent needs; Third, what capabilities the new generation of payment infrastructure needs to possess to win in future competition.

The Differences Between Agents and 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 oriented towards short-term transactions or long-term cooperation?

The answer is: Agents are more like enterprises and will establish long-term relationships.

Agents are often 'lightweight instances' built upon larger commercial systems. For example, an 'intelligent tour guide Agent' supported by a large travel platform, or a franchisee fine-tuned based on local market demand within an existing supply chain system.

Why do Agents behave like enterprises?

First, excellent experiences often come from pre-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 completed this work: it knows which suppliers are reliable, prices have been settled, and it can directly complete the transaction.

This is a business 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, real estate agents, etc., all belong to the category of 'Agents'. These agents establish long-term cooperative relationships with publishers, production companies, watch distributors, or lending institutions, and each transaction is customized based on 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 brought by scale: lower computing power costs, more favorable supplier prices, deeper system integration, and more stable technical components.

Scale continuously reinforces scale. A travel agent booking one million airline tickets a year will inevitably receive 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 capabilities to establish partnerships with platforms like Shopify, Amazon, and Expedia. Small startups often can only rely on automated browsers or reverse API interfaces while bearing retail-level fee structures.

This is also why Agents will ultimately tend towards centralization, or at least most Agents will be built on top of large platforms.

Agents themselves are easy to develop, but economic principles dictate that ultimately 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 Agent behavior is closer to that of enterprises, then two types of payment relationships need to be designed: User → Agent; Agent (or Agent platform) → Supplier

Users paying Agents may adopt various methods: subscription fees, per-task charges, credit lines, authorizing the Agent to use the user's account.

Agents, in turn, pay suppliers through B2B terms, such as: pre-negotiated prices, bulk discounts, Net-30 invoices, sub-agent settlements.

Looking at the structure of current corporate expenditures, Agents will still occasionally use retail payment channels, but this will only constitute a small portion of overall spending.

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 rates, scaled settlements, and working capital arrangements.

Agents and Credit Cards: Seemingly a Match

Many believe credit cards are actually a fairly suitable payment tool for Agents.

Reasons include: global widespread acceptance, suitable for the $20 to $1000 transaction range, built-in arbitration and refund mechanisms, provision of monthly statements. Monthly statements are especially important as they help users understand their spending.

In the future, when Agents replace children and iPads as the main source of 'surprise bills', this may become even more important.

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'.

Difficulty in Upgrading Credit Card Technology

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, Visa 3D took over 15 years to gradually 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: Agents making real-time streaming payments to computing power service providers, Agents paying micro-fees for API calls—these transactions are difficult to complete via credit cards.

The reasons are simple: Visa does not support transactions below 1 cent; the credit card economic model relies on a fixed fee of around 30 cents.

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 amount 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 within existing systems.

Traditional Payments Still Have Their Role

As Agent platforms gradually evolve into enterprise-like systems, a large volume of high-frequency expenditures will be completed through B2B terms: invoices, Net-30, discounts, credit lines.

In this model, the 'payment network' itself is not critical. Settlement may be completed via wire transfer, ACH, or batch transfers. 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: initial cooperative relationships, 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 built on stablecoins, these relationships tend to maintain this form long-term. Over time, the proportion of stablecoins in the payment system is likely to continuously increase.

The Opportunity for New Payment Technology

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.

In terms of economic model, stablecoins also solve the efficiency problems credit cards have at both ends: no 30-cent minimum fee; large transfers are not eroded by interchange fees.

Therefore, whether it's: an Agent paying $0.001 per second for computing power, or a company 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 'tourists', this is indeed a problem. But when users have an Agent acting as a 'guide', this friction quickly decreases.

Agents can help users complete currency exchange and only execute necessary transactions, thereby saving fees. If billing and arbitration mechanisms are layered on top, we approach a complete system.

Imagine a scenario: a user browses multiple brands in a department store, selects items, and finally only needs one checkout. The store backend is responsible for distributing funds to various merchants. Agents need a similar model. What the user sees is: 'Your Agent wants to book a flight, hotel, and rent a car for you.' Not three separate checkout processes.

The Agent platform manages supplier relationships, and the user only needs to confirm the transaction intent.

Conclusion

Agents will not pay like tourists. They will pay like locals, completing transactions through relationships, credit, and long-term cooperation. 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 are already equipped. They are programmable, global, easy to integrate, and capable of supporting Agent payments from day one.

Payment relationships have 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 batch 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 starting right here.

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