Killing Visa? No, Stablecoins Just Want to Earn the Money Visa Can't

Original Title: Agentic Commerce Won't Kill Cards, But It'll Open A Gap

Original Author: @nlevine19

Original Compilation: Peggy, BlockBeats

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

As AI programming tools lower the barrier to software development, an increasing number of "temporary" and "micro-scale" services are emerging: entities without a corporate structure, without a website, and without a 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.

Within this institutional gap, stablecoins may first become an infrastructure. They are not replacing existing payment networks but rather 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."

Note: The author, Levine, is currently an Investment Partner at a16z Crypto, focusing long-term on the intersection of crypto, payments, and financial infrastructure. Before joining a16z, he worked at Visa on on-chain strategy and data, and also held strategy and data roles at RTFKT.

The following is the original text:

The Wrong Battlefield

A few weeks ago, an article published by Citrini Research suggested that stablecoins would pose a "disintermediation" threat to Visa and Mastercard, causing a market stir and a significant drop in the stock prices of the related card networks. The crypto community cheered on social media. The argument sounds logically clear: AI agents will optimize every transaction, card swipe fees are just a "tax," and stablecoins can bypass it. I work in the crypto industry every day and wish this assessment 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 payment cards. The real opportunity lies with the merchants of the future who will find it difficult to access the card system.

Cards Will Still Win Most Battles

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

But card networks are not just tools for "moving money." They also provide:

• Unsecured credit
• Pre-authorization for uncertain transactions
• Fraud protection and chargeback mechanisms

Stablecoins can indeed 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, you can dispute the charge and request a chargeback with a credit card; if you paid with stablecoins, that money is essentially irreversibly transferred.

The reality is:

• 82% of Americans hold credit cards with reward points
• There are approximately 18 billion payment cards in circulation globally

For most consumer scenarios, users will not voluntarily give up: purchase protection, reward points, in exchange 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 tens of billions of global transactions, while stablecoins currently lack a similar network-level anti-fraud system.

Common Arguments for "Stablecoins Will Win" Don't Hold Up

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

For example: Visa has processed over 2 billion public transit payments by consolidating multiple taps 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 claim is: "AI agents cannot hold payment cards." But an AI agent is essentially just a new device. 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 hasn't undergone 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 pilot stages
• Mastercard's Agent Pay is available to all US cardholders

Meanwhile, the Agentic Commerce Protocol built by Stripe and OpenAI is live, Etsy is integrated, and over 1 million Shopify merchants are preparing for integration.

For existing merchants and consumers, card networks will likely still dominate commercial payments in the age 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 person-to-person trading, these sellers struggled to get merchant accounts, so PayPal served them, rapidly growing into a platform with millions of users

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

As investors Alex Rampell and James da Costa have pointed out: when Stripe was founded, many companies that would later become its customers didn't even exist yet.

The rule in the payments industry has always been simple: the winners often serve the new merchants whose risks 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 batch: a quarter of companies had over 95% of their code generated by AI; on the AI programming platform Bolt.new: 67% of its 5 million users are not developers.

This means: millions of people who previously couldn't write production code 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 spends four hours using AI programming tools to develop an API for displaying public company financial data. This project might 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, generating $40 in total revenue. No one ever visited 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 current answer is often: they can't.

Structural Barriers in the Traditional Payment System

Existing payment processors struggle to onboard these merchants not due to a lack of technology, but due to the risk structure.

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

• If the merchant commits fraud
• If there are a large number of chargebacks

The processor is liable. Therefore, processors only approve merchants that can be underwritten.

And an API service with: no website, no corporate entity, no operational history, struggles 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. Historically, they have made similar adjustments, such as creating new risk tiers for platform 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 makes it hard to pass the card system's review.

For example:

The x402 protocol already allows embedding stablecoin payments directly within HTTP requests

• No merchant account needed
• No payment processor needed
• No underwriting needed
• 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're replacing "nothing."

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

What Will Happen

Historically, each 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.

Cards 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.

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