Does payment between AI agents always require Crypto?

Author: Han Qin , JarsyCEO

A friend asked if crypto is always required for payments between AI agents.

It's true that crypto isn't always necessary, and it's not impossible to do it without crypto. However, native payments between AI agents are structurally easier to implement using crypto. Visa and Mastercard can also support some scenarios, but they have fundamental limitations.

If AI is simply helping people pay, then traditional payment methods are perfectly adequate. However, if it involves autonomous settlements between AIs, then the structural advantages of crypto are quite significant. The fundamental difference lies in whether it's a human-in-the-loop or a machine-native economy.

Do Visa and Mastercard support agent payments?

Yes, it's possible, but only in an agent-based model, where AI simply operates payment accounts on behalf of a person. For example, if AI helps you book a flight, it can access your credit card. AI automatically purchases cloud resources and can be linked to a corporate card; AI SaaS auto-renewal uses Stripe and Visa Rails. These scenarios don't require crypto at all.

However, traditional payment methods have structural limitations. First, the account system is identity-linked, requiring risk control, auditing, and revocable transactions—a typical human financial system. Second, traditional payment systems rely on bulk clearing, with credit cards having T+1 to T+3 settlement. The numerous intermediaries and high fees are acceptable for human consumption, but not fast enough for the machine economy.

In addition, traditional payment networks do not support high-frequency, small-amount payments, but the typical payment characteristics of the AI ​​Agent economy are settlement per second, payment at the cent level, and automatic triggering at the API level. Credit cards have minimum fees and transaction costs, and are not suitable for streaming payments.

Why do people say that the Agent Economy is naturally inclined towards crypto? It's not because of faith, but because the technological structure is indeed a good match. Without identity verification, agents can generate their own wallets, sign their own transactions, and conduct their own transactions without account opening approvals. This is crucial for the machine economy; otherwise, it would be completely impractical for each AI agent to connect to a bank account. Secondly, there's real-time settlement. Blockchain settlement is near-instantaneous, irrevocable, and without intermediaries, while the Visa card network is essentially an IOU system (IOU system).

A straightforward analogy is that Visa and Mastercard are like HTTP plus a banking system for the human internet, suitable for person-to-person and person-to-merchant interactions. Crypto Rails, on the other hand, is like TCP/IP plus a native settlement layer for the machine internet, suitable for AI-to-AI automated economies in a trustless environment.

The most likely future form of this collaboration will be a layered system. The upper layer consists of fiat currency gateways, including Visa and Mastercard bank accounts, responsible for authenticating human funds and ensuring compliance with KYC (Know Your Customer) requirements. The middle layer comprises stablecoin settlement, including USDC and tokenized deposits, handling fast settlements, API payments, and cross-platform interoperability. The bottom layer is the agent-to-agent economy, including wallets, signatures, automated payments, and machine protocols.

Determining whether an agent payment scenario requires crypto depends on whether there are continuous, autonomous transactions that do not require human authorization. If the answer is YES, then crypto has a significant advantage; if the answer is NO, then traditional Rails is sufficient.

This is why the AI ​​Agent economy and tokenization are highly coupled. When tokenization turns assets into APIs, and stablecoins turn money into APIs, the next step is for AI agents to turn decision-making into APIs as well. Together, these three create programmable capital markets.

Visa is a payment network within a human trust system, while crypto is a settlement layer within a machine trust system. Their relationship is one of division of labor over time, rather than one of replacement.