Influential companies in payments and crypto are accelerating efforts to expand machine-to-machine payments ecosystems in which AI agents execute stablecoin transactions without human involvement.

Attention is focused on whether it can establish itself as a mainstream fintech paradigm, and how quickly it can grow.

According to a recent Bloomberg report, Circle and Stripe are developing systems using stablecoin rails for autonomous commerce that would allow AI agents to bypass traditional credit-card networks.

Circle is focusing on payment infrastructure for autonomous AI agents using stablecoins. It has introduced Arc, its own blockchain specialized for stablecoin payments, and is also testing nanopayments that support AI agents holding balances and transacting across networks. Circle says the per-transaction cost is far below 1 cent, making high-frequency machine-to-machine commerce economically viable.

Stripe, a B2B payments platform company, has poured more than $1.1 billion into building stablecoin infrastructure, including its 2025 acquisition of Bridge. It also introduced Tempo, a blockchain project specialized for stablecoin payments, in cooperation with crypto-focused venture investment firm Paradigm.

Stripe integrated the x402 protocol, which supports Circle's USDC payments, based on Base, an Ethereum layer-2 blockchain.

x402, introduced by crypto exchange Coinbase and cloud and security company Cloudflare, is an internet-native payment standard that uses the HTTP 402 status code and supports agents paying with stablecoins without accounts, subscriptions or API keys.

Circle and Stripe are heading for the same destination of AI-agent payments, but are moving along different routes.

Circle is focusing on a settlement layer and nanopayments capabilities, while Stripe appears to be concentrating on merchant integration and building blockchain rails.

Their moves rest on the view that traditional credit-card networks may be hard to apply in a payment environment centered on AI agents. According to Blockonomy, existing card networks charge a flat fee and a fee of a few percent of the transaction amount for every transaction. That structure may work when people buy goods, but it is difficult to apply in scenarios where software agents pay a few cents for API calls or data requests.

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire (제레미 알레어) presented large-scale use of each other's services by AI agents as a future scenario in a conference call held after an earnings release in late February.

For example, a legal skills agent could handle thousands of requests a day from external agents, with each transaction costing only a few cents, and it would not be easy to use a credit-card network for that, he said.

Benchmark-StoneX analyst Mark Palmer (마크 팔머) said, "Micro-payments are not compatible with traditional payment rails in terms of cost, latency and programmability." He added that stablecoins embedded directly into software workflows remove settlement delays and a cost structure in which card payments are difficult to make work.

At this point, AI-agent payments using stablecoins are at around $50 million, making them far beyond niche when set against annual stablecoin transaction volumes of $46 trillion. It still has a long way to go given forecasts that the global e-commerce market will reach $6.88 trillion this year. Circle CEO Allaire is also uncertain about when agentic transaction volumes will grow to a meaningful scale.

How much merchants, who play a key role in the payment experience, will accept stablecoin payments is a key issue. The current situation is not friendly to stablecoins. Chris Donat (크리스 도낫) of BWG Global said, "Merchants follow consumer demand. Unless a significant number of consumers ask, merchants will not go out of their way to accept a new payment method," adding, "For now, consumers are not demanding stablecoin payments on a meaningful scale."

Stablecoin transactions also lack the fraud prevention, dispute resolution and credit extension function in which card companies front payment amounts that card payments provide. In the short term, a realistic solution is seen as AI agents using virtual cards while settlement is processed in the back end through stablecoin payment infrastructure. Analysis suggests that in such a scenario, stablecoins and credit-card networks are likely to coexist.