The financial industry is undergoing a major shift with the emergence of agentic commerce, a model where AI-powered entities drive autonomous transactions without human intervention. In a recent report, global payments giant Visa, in collaboration with analytics firm Artemis, highlights a fundamental distinction between two types of exchange: macro-commerce, which covers traditional transactions, and micro-commerce, characterized by constant flows of intra-day machine-to-machine payments.
Visa's strategic pivot is based on the incompatibility of current infrastructure with this new machine economy. While bank card networks impose prohibitive fixed fees for amounts under one dollar, blockchain technologies offer an optimal solution thanks to their ability to process settlements for fractions of a cent. Consequently, stablecoins are emerging as the preferred tool for facilitating these data and computing resource exchanges, which occur thousands of times every hour.
Far from seeing a frontal clash, Visa anticipates a hybridization of systems. The company’s vision is one of complementarity, where traditional banking rails continue to serve human-scale purchases, while stablecoins provide native connectivity for software agents. This convergence is already being illustrated by the integration of crypto-native protocols into traditional payment infrastructures, aiming to marry established trust standards with the instant efficiency of distributed settlement.
However, the mass deployment of these automated payments raises unprecedented legal and operational challenges. Current regulatory frameworks, designed for accountability and disputes at "human speed," are ill-suited for complex litigation involving chains of AI agents executing high-frequency transactions. The question of the legal and financial liability of these autonomous entities remains the main friction point to be resolved to allow for widespread adoption.
To realize this ambition, Visa is stepping up its investments, notably through its involvement in stablecoin projects such as Open USD. While regulatory uncertainties persist, the rise of machine-to-machine micro-commerce promises to provide stablecoins with a concrete and massive use case, anchoring them firmly in the real economy far beyond the traditional speculative activities of the crypto market.