Author: Confiux

The future of online transactions may no longer require people to take out their phones and click to pay.

Imagine this: when you give a command, your "AI assistant" quietly takes care of everything for you—it automatically compares prices, places orders, renews subscriptions, and even negotiates prices with other AI agents, completing settlements directly. During this process, it may have made dozens to hundreds of small payments, each amounting to just a few cents, or even a thousandth of a dollar.

This is the machine economy that AI agents are about to bring. And a fundamental dispute over the micro-payment revolution is quietly breaking out between Visa and Coinbase.

The "Incompatibility" of Traditional Payment Networks

Unlike the traditional "one API call, one large payment" model, the way AI agents operate is high-frequency and fragmented. For example, when a "content AI editor" writes an article for you, the following may occur:

• Calling real-time news API: $0.002
• Querying on-chain data: $0.004
• Using financial model analysis: $0.003
• Paying for final text generation: several small payments

Although the total cost may be less than $0.02, it is split into multiple settlements. If going through traditional payment channels, just a single minimum fee (e.g. $0.3) would be enough to bankrupt this economic model.

In addition, existing payment processes are filled with human-computer interaction elements such as "checkout," "settlement page," and "SMS verification." However, payments between AI agents do not have a "checkout page"; they simply complete payments seamlessly in a regular web request.

This is also why the magnificent empires built by Visa and Mastercard seem out of place in front of the future machine economy. Because the next-generation trillion-dollar payment network is likely to be a network without payment pages, leaving only silent settlements between machines in the background.

Coinbase: Rebuilding the "On-Chain Stablecoin Internet"

As a leading cryptocurrency company, Coinbase's choice is to start anew. It attempts to use two significant weapons to build a native crypto settlement layer for the AI economy—

The first weapon is Agentic Wallets, a wallet infrastructure tailored for AIs: AI agents can independently create wallets, hold funds, and make transactions and purchases. More importantly, on Coinbase's Layer 2 network Base, "gas-free transactions" can be realized, completely eliminating the biggest friction for high-frequency micro-payments.

The second weapon is the open protocol x402, which is a more disruptive step: the x402 protocol allows a USDC stablecoin payment to be directly embedded in a regular HTTP network request. For example, if an AI crawler wants to access a paid article, it can attach $0.001 USDC in the request, and after the payment is completed, it automatically obtains the full text. The whole process requires no human intervention, achieving "access equals payment."

Currently, x402 has garnered support from giants like Cloudflare, Circle, AWS, and even Stripe, and has been incorporated into Google's open proxy payment standards, targeting the ambition of becoming the "default settlement layer for the machine internet."

Coinbase's path essentially acknowledges AI agents as independent economic entities and uses stablecoins and public chains to build an open, low-cost, globally applicable payment internet for them.

Visa: Bridging the "Trusted AI Protocol"

Unlike Coinbase's radical revolution, Visa has chosen a gradual improvement approach, which is clear and conservative:

• Not altering the foundation: continuing to focus on fiat currency and bank account systems, relying on existing card organizations and settlement networks.
• Transforming the upper layer: granting limited permissions to AI agents through protocols, binding their actions to the identities of real cardholders to meet existing KYC/AML (anti-money laundering) regulatory requirements.

Among these, Visa's "Trusted Agent Protocol" aims to provide encryption verification and risk control mechanisms when AI agents initiate payments on behalf of cardholders. Moreover, another traditional payment giant, Mastercard, has also completed the first real bank payment involving AI agents in Europe with Santander Bank.

The idea behind the Visa/Mastercard approach is to integrate AI into and serve the existing human financial internet rather than create a whole new world for them. This divergence essentially represents the struggle for future discourse power between the "closed card organization internet" and the "open crypto-native internet."

Who Will Be Reshaped First?

Which industries will first feel the impact of this transformation? The answer is those fields that are highly interactive and have highly fragmented values:

• Healthcare: AI pays per access for every electronic medical record retrieved or every visit to imaging data APIs when processing insurance claims.
• Logistics and Supply Chain: Procurement AIs real-time bid and order from thousands of suppliers, with each order confirmation and settlement being a micro-payment from machine to machine.
• Content and Media: AI crawlers or research tools pay tiny fees for content by the article or section, bypassing complicated copyright negotiations.
• Fintech: Quantitative trading AIs purchase market risk signals or research reports on a per-item basis, with each piece of information being an on-chain settlement.

In these scenarios, the costs of traditional payments far exceed the value of transactions themselves, making on-chain micro-payments nearly the only viable economic model. However, the most likely outcome is not the elimination of one party by the other, but the formation of a "dual track coexistence," with the real suspense being the scale.

Future Landscape

Payments will always be the foundational soil of commerce. As AI agents begin to become the main participants in the economy, the type of "currency" and "payment network" provided to them will directly determine the future flow of wealth and the formulation of rules.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong believes that in the future, the number of transactions on the internet will be more from AI than from humans. Binance's former CEO Changpeng Zhao predicts even more aggressively: the number of payments initiated by AI agents will be one million times that of humans, with almost all settled in cryptocurrency.

If this prophecy comes true, then what the current crypto payment sector is betting on is not a niche market, but the main thoroughfare of the future internet economy.

This silent "route war" has long been ignited in codes and protocols.

*This content is for reference only and does not constitute any investment advice. The market has risks; investments require caution.

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