Visa Report: AI Agentic Payments Enter Practical Stage, Stablecoins Better Suited for High-Frequency Micro-Payments

According to a report by Jinse Finance on July 16, Visa and Artemis jointly released a research report titled *Agentic Payments from the Ground Up*, highlighting that AI agentic payments are transitioning from theory to real-world commercial applications, categorized into macro-commerce and micro-commerce. Macro-commerce refers to agents completing tasks like bookings and subscriptions on behalf of humans, similar to traditional e-commerce; micro-commerce involves high-frequency, low-value payments between software, typically under $1. The report analyzed two machine-native payment protocols: x402, which has processed approximately $150 million in adjusted transaction volume across 109.6 million transactions since its launch in May 2025, primarily on Base, Solana, and Polygon; and MPP, built by Stripe and Tempo, which has settled about $25,000 across approximately 115,000 transactions since its mid-March 2026 launch. The average payment amount for both protocols is just a few cents, whereas traditional credit card transaction fees are fixed and significantly higher, making them unsuitable for such micro-payment scenarios. In terms of settlement methods, traditional card payments are more suitable for macro-commerce scenarios, while stablecoins are better suited for micro-commerce involving small-value payments. The report suggests that the future trend will be a fusion of the two methods rather than a binary choice. A key challenge for AI agentic payments lies in accountability—when an agent makes a mistake, it is unclear who should be held responsible, as current legal frameworks do not yet cover such scenarios.