AI smart payments blocked: Visa (V.US) warns of infrastructure bottlenecks

According to Woofun AI, the global bank card payment infrastructure is facing serious challenges from AI agents, and Visa (V.US) and Artemis jointly released a report on Wednesday to reveal this core contradiction. The original purpose of traditional card base design is to serve low-frequency human transactions. It is difficult to carry the high-frequency micropayments required by AI agents with almost zero fees and fast settlement, causing commercial viability to be blocked.

As AI agents break through critical capability thresholds in 2025, they independently discover unfamiliar APIs, evaluate prices, and make payment decisions, forcing the imminent construction of new infrastructure. Australian cryptocurrency exchange Swyftx predicted earlier this week that if adoption remains at 33%, AI native payment methods based on stablecoins will drive the market to generate $262 billion in stablecoin trading volume by 2033.

According to data compiled by Woofun AI, this growth forecast is based on the underlying logic of AI-driven explosive expansion of microenterprises, and traditional payment systems cannot be accepted without upgrading.

Among existing solutions, the x402 payment protocol developed by Coinbase (COIN.US) has shown strong user adoption. Since its launch in May 2025, the agreement has processed a cumulative total of $15 million worth of transactions, with a total of more than 109 million transactions. Entering October 2025, the scale of its transactions jumped exponentially. The average number of monthly transactions surged from 40,000 to 3.8 million, and the monthly processing volume reached 38 million.

At the same time, the machine payment protocol launched by Tempo has achieved dual-track operation, supporting both on-chain cryptocurrency payments and fiat payments through shared payment tokens, providing support for diverse scenarios.

Visa and Artemis are calling for a unified machine payment framework to be compatible with stablecoin and traditional bank card transactions at the same time, and open up the lines of supervision of AI-driven payment processes. Through its Card Specification SDK, Visa is extending the protocol to commercial applications of AI agents based on bank cards.

Notably, Visa's cryptocurrency business unit and Stripe-backed Tempo both launched new tools in March: the former helps AI agents achieve same-day payments, while the latter aims to simplify the payment process for AI entities, marking the official implementation of the machine payment agreement.