AI agents detonate payment transformation: traditional networks fail, public chains rise

According to Woofun AI, Sandy Kaur, head of Franklin Templeton's digital assets and innovation business, wrote an article on the X platform defining AI agents as the next disruptive application scenario in the blockchain field, believing that they will reshape the payment infrastructure landscape.

The underlying reason lies in the structural mismatch of traditional payment architectures. Visa (V.US) and investment analysis platform Artemis pointed out in a joint report that traditional credit card networks designed specifically for low-frequency human commercial transactions are limited by high processing fees and long settlement times of one to three days, and are completely unable to match the machine-to-machine micropayment scenarios required by AI agents. The latter requires near-zero fees and extremely fast settlement infrastructure to support commercial operations.

From a structural point of view, high-performance public chains and payment giants are speeding up their layout to fill this gap. Networks such as Aptos, Solana, and BNB Chain are regarded as the ideal underpinning to support the smart economy due to their ability to complete transaction settlement within seconds.

Meanwhile, Visa's cryptocurrency business unit and Stripe-supported Tempo both launched AI tools in March, with the Visa solution already implementing same-day payment capabilities for AI agents.

Market-verified data further corroborates this trend. According to data compiled by Woofun AI, the x402 payment protocol developed by Coinbase (COIN.US) has processed $15 million worth of payments in more than 109 million transactions since it went live in May 2025. This shows that machine-to-machine automated payment protocols have moved from proof of concept to large-scale application, becoming the new frontier of blockchain value capture after DeFi.