Some in the tech industry say AI agents will prefer stablecoins over cards, and that card networks will take a hit. Recently, research firm Citroni published a report saying stablecoins would push out Visa and Mastercard. Card-company shares then plunged and the crypto industry cheered.

Simon Taylor (사이먼 테일러), founder of FintechBrainfood, recently pushed back on social media platform X (Twitter). He said the idea that if AI agents optimise all transactions then card fees become a burden and stablecoins will fill the gap sounds plausible but is wrong. It is not that stablecoins are meaningless, he said, but that replacing cards is unrealistic.

He also presented a realistic scenario in which agents use both cards and stablecoins.

He said: "Cards authorise the movement of money. Stablecoins move money. They are not competitors but complementary. Most of what people call 'agentic commerce' is, in the end, a few more steps added to the process of a person buying something. It could be finding a product in ChatGPT and paying, or asking it to buy on your behalf when a price hits a certain level. In that case, the agent does not need its own payment method. It can just use the user's card. Card networks and AI companies are already building protocols for this together."

To illustrate this, he cited scenarios in which an AI agent uses another large language model, buys an expensive dataset or uses another agent service.

For now, a developer buys directly and hands access rights to the agent, which is hard to see as a truly agentic method. Still, letting an agent hold a card is also risky. It is not free from risks such as excessive spending, prompt injection and fraud.

A payment method is needed that can be constrained to specific merchants, within set limits and, in some cases, can disappear after one use. Virtual cards are a representative example. Taylor said: "Virtual cards can be set to single-use, capped, limited by merchant type and even locked to a specific merchant. If you view the agent as a customer, these control functions are key."

Against this backdrop, the stablecoin camp is also moving faster to capture the agent payment market. Circle, which issues the USDC stablecoin, launched Nanopay, an ultra-low-cost payment method for agents. Cloudflare and Coinbase introduced x402, an internet-native payment standard using the HTTP 402 status code. It allows agents to pay in stablecoins without an account, registration or an API key.

But the reality is that volumes are still not large. Cards work everywhere, but stablecoins are still far from that level.

On this, Taylor sets out two directions for stablecoin use in agent commerce. Neither is a scenario in which cards are replaced.

The first is using stablecoins as a settlement method behind the umbrella of cards. Taylor said: "It is not very visible, but at scale it is big that payment processors settle instantly from Visa and that card issuers handle things directly without going through correspondent banks. An agent could buy a large volume of Anthropic API tokens and run its balance down before revenue comes in. Instant settlement in stablecoins speeds up that cycle. It does not replace cards, it makes cards work better."

The second is using them as a native payment method for complex agent workflows.

He said: "If an agent only occasionally buys data, a virtual card is enough. Organisations running dozens or hundreds of agents are different. With virtual cards, a master agent either has to make all purchases for sub-agents, or there is a cost each time you create a new card. With wallets, you can instantly create sub-wallets with granular rules. It is not that stablecoins are cheaper, but that they fit better."

He added: "Cards and stablecoins split roles depending on complexity. First a virtual card, then a card that settles in stablecoins, and finally a wallet that manages an entire agent organisation. AI can seem slow for a while and then suddenly leap. Payments are the same. It is not cards or stablecoins. Cards first, then stablecoins."