a16z: The real opportunity for stablecoins lies not in disruption but in filling gaps

Original Title: Agentic commerce won't kill cards, but it will open a gap

Original Author: Noah Levine, a16z Investment Partner

Original Translation: Saoirse, Foresight News

A few weeks ago, an article published by Citrini Research claimed that stablecoins would bypass Visa and Mastercard, directly leading to a significant drop in the stock prices of card organizations. The crypto community cheered.

This logic sounds clear: AI agents will optimize every transaction, and fees are a kind of "tax" that stablecoins can avoid.

I spend all day in the crypto space and wish this statement were true, but it is mostly wrong.

Not because stablecoins are unimportant, but because the real opportunity lies not in replacing bank cards, but in serving merchants who struggle to access traditional card payments.

Bank Cards Will Capture the Vast Majority of the Market

Citrini's argument is based on a hypothesis: an AI agent, free from human habits, will actively optimize away card organization fees.

But bank cards are not just transfer tools. They provide unsecured credit, pre-authorization for uncertain transactions, and fraud protection through chargeback rights.

Stablecoins can transfer money, but they cannot do the rest.

Imagine your agent booked you a hotel, but the reality does not match the pictures.

With a bank card, you can dispute the charge and get your money back.

With stablecoins, once the money is sent, it cannot be retrieved.

82% of Americans hold reward credit cards (referring to credit cards with perks like cash back, points, airline miles, hotel points, etc.), and there are as many as 18 billion cards in circulation globally.

For the vast majority of transactions, consumers will not voluntarily give up consumer protection and rewards to choose a payment method that offers neither benefits nor reversibility.

Fraud detection is another significant advantage of card organizations: card networks can run models on billions of transactions in real-time.

Stablecoins currently lack a comparable network-level anti-fraud layer.

Microtransactions are often said to be the weak point of bank cards, but card organizations have long adapted to such mismatched transactions.

Visa has already processed over 2 billion transportation ticket transactions by aggregating multiple card swipes into daily settlements.

The card industry has never abandoned any type of transaction; it always invents new products to cover them.

Another criticism is: "Agents can't hold cards."

But agents are essentially just new devices.

Your phone, watch, and computer all hold independent tokens pointing to the same card, just like Apple Pay.

Phones have never done KYC; they simply hold your token, and so do agents.

Visa has issued over 16 billion tokens, and agents will also use these tokens.

Visa's smart commerce framework is currently in pilot, and Mastercard's Agent Pay has been launched for cardholders across the U.S.

The conclusion is clear:

For existing merchants and consumers, bank cards are almost destined to dominate agentic commerce.

The opportunity for stablecoins lies elsewhere—among those merchants that have yet to emerge.

Those Merchants That Have Yet to Emerge

Every platform migration gives rise to a wave of merchants that existing payment systems cannot serve.

When eBay emerged, individual sellers could not open merchant accounts, and PayPal served them;

Shopify grew from 42,000 merchants to 5.5 million in 13 years;

When Stripe was founded, many of its customers had not even been born.

The pattern is always consistent: winners serve merchants that existing giants cannot underwrite.

The AI wave will give rise to such merchants faster than any previous platform migration.

Just last year, 36 million new developers joined GitHub.

In the YC Winter 2025 batch, a quarter of the companies have codebases that are over 95% AI-generated.

On the popular AI programming platform Bolt.new, 67% of its 5 million users are not even developers.

People who couldn't write production-level code two years ago are now releasing software.

They are both buyers of developer services and simultaneously become sellers.

Imagine this:

An ordinary developer uses AI tools to create a financial data presentation tool for a public company in 4 hours. No website, no terms of service, no legal entity.

Another developer's agent calls it 40,000 times a week, at $0.001 each, generating $40 in revenue. No one has ever clicked the checkout page.

I see developers creating such tools every week.

Their first question is always: How do I get paid?

For most, the answer is: You can't get paid right now.

Existing payment institutions find it difficult to onboard such merchants.

It's not that the technology is lacking, but once payment institutions onboard a merchant, they must assume the associated risks.

If a merchant commits fraud or generates a large number of chargebacks, the payment institution takes the hit.

Tools without websites, entities, or records are almost impossible to pass risk control audits.

The system operates as designed; it just wasn't designed for such scenarios.

Payment institutions can certainly adjust; they have done so in the past.

But it took PayPal 16 years from launch to the industry's first underwriting guidelines for payment service providers.

And these new merchants need to get paid now.

For them, accepting stablecoins is like street vendors only accepting cash.

It's not that cash is better; it's that these merchants have historically found it very difficult to get approved for card acceptance.

In this gap, stablecoins are currently the only viable solution.

Despite the rough wallet experience and the compliance framework still being formed, protocols like x402 can already embed stablecoin payments directly into HTTP requests:

No merchant account needed, no processor needed, no onboarding needed, no chargeback liability needed.

These merchants are not choosing between stablecoins and bank cards.

They are choosing between stablecoins and not getting paid.

New Businesses Will Emerge Here

Every wave of new merchants will eventually be absorbed by traditional payment systems, and this time is likely no different.

But the order is always: merchants appear first, and risk control follows.

In the gaps between these two periods, stablecoins serve as the infrastructure.

• Bank cards serve all merchants that payment institutions can underwrite;
• Stablecoins serve all merchants that payment institutions cannot underwrite.

The next wave of business will be born in this gap.