The report, titled "Agentic Payments from the Ground Up," examines the rise of agency commerce, where artificial intelligence agents initiate and complete transactions independently. The central finding of the report concerns the role of stablecoins in the future of commerce.
According to the report, agency business will be divided into two main categories. Macro commerce involves agents carrying out consumer-scale transactions on behalf of humans, such as travel bookings or subscription management. Microcommerce involves frequent, sub-dollar payments for services such as application interface calls between software systems or computing resources. The report noted that traditional card infrastructure remains suitable for macro trading, but fixed fees make sub-dollar payments uneconomic. Stablecoins are becoming a more viable option for these types of payments as new blockchains reduce the cost of consensus to a fraction of a cent.
Visa stated that the issue will not come down to a choice between the card and the stablecoin, and that both will find a place. According to the company, cards are better suited for large purchases in today's merchant networks, while stablecoins are better suited for micropayments between machines. Visa said it expects agency trading to adopt a hybrid flow that combines both card and stablecoin infrastructure at different stages of an assignment.
According to the company, this rapprochement has already begun. Card-based protocols add stablecoin support, while crypto-based protocols include elements of traditional trust infrastructure. Visa wrote that the line between the two camps has become increasingly difficult to draw, and that the two are now starting to look less like rivals and more like parts of the same system. The company stated that its goal is to support card-based trust and authorization along with machine-specific consensus by providing interoperability between the two.
Trust remains a key issue for agency business. Because traditional commerce is based on the assumption that the purchase is made by a person who has jurisdiction and can be held legally and financially responsible. According to Visa, existing legal and regulatory frameworks were not written with this type of delegation in mind, and clear precedents on the subject may not yet exist.
Current chargeback times and evidence rules were also designed for human-paced commerce, according to the report. In an environment where complex agent chains process thousands of transactions per hour, there is currently no established method on how to reverse disputed payments. Visa also recently teamed up with companies like Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock and Coinbase to launch Open USD, a new stablecoin project that shares the bulk of its reserve revenue.