Visa and Artemis: AI agents have wallets now — the card networks just can't keep up 🪙

Traditional card payment infrastructure is struggling to handle the high-frequency micropayments required by autonomous AI agents, according to a joint report published Wednesday by payments giant Visa and investment thesis platform Artemis. The report found that legacy card systems, originally built for human commerce and low-frequency transactions, lack the near-zero fees and faster settlement times needed to make agentic micropayments commercially viable.

The report identified mid-2025 as the point at which AI agents crossed a key capability threshold, allowing them to discover unfamiliar APIs, evaluate prices and decide on autonomous payments without human input. It concluded that while AI agents are initiating a foundational change in commerce, current infrastructure gaps are limiting their mainstream adoption.

Australian crypto exchange Swyftx said earlier this week that AI-enabled microbusinesses could drive an additional $262 billion in stablecoin volume by 2033 through AI-native payments settled in stablecoins, based on an assumed adoption rate of about 33%. Visa and Artemis said a single machine-payments framework could support both stablecoin and traditional card transactions, adding: "The trajectory points toward convergence rather than competition: cards for proxy purchases inside existing merchant networks, stablecoins for machine-native micropayments, and hybrid flows where both are used within the same workflow."

Some agentic payment standards are already showing signs of user adoption. The x402 payment protocol developed by Coinbase processed $15 million in adjusted volume across more than 109 million adjusted transactions since its launch in May 2025. Monthly transaction counts rose sharply in October 2025, climbing from 40,000 to 3.8 million and producing 38 million transactions processed that month alone.

The report said the same machine-payment framework can support both stablecoin-based flows and card transactions, creating a path into agentic payment flows for card networks. It noted that Tempo's Machine Payment Protocol (MPP) now spans both onchain crypto payments and fiat payments via shared payment tokens. Visa said its Card Specification SDK was designed to extend the protocol into card-based agent commerce. Visa's crypto division and Stripe-backed Tempo both launched AI tools in March, with Visa's allowing AI agents to make same-day payments and Tempo debuting its Machine Payments Protocol designed to make it easier for AI actors to send and receive money.