Visa and analytics firm Artemis released a research report on Wednesday highlighting how stablecoins will facilitate micro-commerce in the age of the agentic economy.
The report, titled "Agentic Payments from the Ground Up," examines the emergence of agentic commerce, where AI agents independently initiate and complete transactions.
A central finding concerns the role of stablecoins in the future of commerce.
The report said there will be mainly two categories of agentic commerce: macro-commerce, in which agents act on behalf of humans for consumer-sized transactions such as booking travel or managing subscriptions, and micro-commerce, which involves frequent sub-dollar payments between software systems for services such as API calls or compute resources.
While the report said traditional card rails remain well suited for macro-commerce, fixed fees associated with existing rails make sub-dollar micro-payments uneconomic. Newer blockchains have reduced settlement costs to fractions of a cent, which makes stablecoins a more viable option for such payments.
