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

Agentic commerce won’t kill cards, but it will open a gap

Noah Levine, a16z Partner

Foresight News

A few weeks ago, Citrini Research published an article claiming that stablecoins will bypass Visa and MasterCard, directly causing a sharp drop in card organization stocks. The crypto community cheered.

This logic sounds clear: AI agents will optimize every transaction, and fees are a kind of “tax,” which stablecoins can bypass.

I spend all day in the crypto space and hope this is correct, but most of it is wrong.

Not because stablecoins are unimportant, but because the real opportunity isn’t replacing bank cards, but serving merchants who find it hard to access traditional card payments.

Bank cards will dominate most of the market

Citrini’s argument is based on a hypothesis: AI agents, freed from human habits, will proactively eliminate card organization fees.

But bank cards are more than just transfer tools. They provide unsecured credit, pre-authorization for uncertain transactions, and fraud protection through chargeback rights.

Stablecoins can transfer money but can’t do the rest.

Suppose your AI agent books a hotel for you, but the room is completely different from the pictures.

With a bank card, you can dispute and recover your funds.

With stablecoins, once the money is gone, it can’t be recovered.

82% of Americans hold reward credit cards (such as cashback, points, airline miles, hotel points), and there are up to 18 billion cards in circulation worldwide.

For most transactions, consumers won’t voluntarily give up purchase protections and points to choose a payment method that offers no benefits and is irreversible.

Fraud detection is a huge advantage for card networks: they can run real-time models on billions of transactions.

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

Small payments are often seen as a weakness of bank cards, but card organizations have long adapted to such mismatched transactions.

Visa, for example, consolidates multiple swipes into daily settlements, handling over 2 billion transit tickets.

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

Some might argue, “But AI agents can’t hold cards.”

But AI agents are 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 only hold your tokens, and the same applies to AI agents.

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

Visa’s intelligent commerce framework is currently in pilot, and Mastercard’s Agent Pay is now available to all US cardholders.

Stripe, in partnership with OpenAI, has integrated an intelligent commerce protocol with Etsy, and over a million Shopify merchants are about to go live.

The conclusion is clear:

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

The opportunity for stablecoins lies elsewhere—in merchants that haven’t yet appeared.

Merchants that haven’t yet emerged

Every platform migration spurs a wave of merchants that current payment systems can’t serve.

When eBay appeared, individual sellers couldn’t open merchant accounts; PayPal served them.

Over 13 years, Shopify grew from 42,000 to 5.5 million merchants.

When Stripe was founded, many of its future clients didn’t even exist yet.

The pattern remains consistent: winners serve merchants that existing giants can’t insure.

The AI wave will accelerate this process faster than any previous platform migration.

Last year alone, 36 million new developers joined GitHub.

In YC Winter 2025 batch, over 95% of code repositories are AI-generated.

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

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

They are both buyers and sellers of developer services.

Imagine:

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

Another developer’s AI agent calls it 40,000 times in a week, earning $40 at $0.001 per call, all without anyone clicking a checkout page.

I see developers making tools like this every week.

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

For most, the answer is: Currently, they can’t.

Existing payment providers find it hard to onboard these merchants.

It’s not a technical issue; it’s that once a payment provider takes on a merchant, it assumes the risk.

If the merchant commits fraud or causes大量 chargebacks, the provider bears the blame.

Tools without websites, legal entities, or records are nearly impossible to pass risk controls.

The system operates as designed, but it wasn’t built for these scenarios.

Of course, payment providers can adjust—they have before.

But it took PayPal 16 years from launch to industry first issuing underwriting guidelines for PSPs.

And these new merchants need to start accepting payments 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 always struggled to get approved for bank card acceptance.

In this gap, stablecoins are the only feasible solution.

Though wallet experiences are rough and compliance frameworks are still evolving, protocols like x402 can embed stablecoin payments directly into HTTP requests:

No merchant accounts, no processors, no onboarding, no chargeback liability.

These merchants aren’t choosing between stablecoins and bank cards.

They’re choosing between stablecoins and not getting paid.

New businesses will emerge from here

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

But the order always is: merchants first, risk management second.

In the gap between these phases, stablecoins are the infrastructure.

· Bank card services all merchants that traditional payment providers can insure;

· Stablecoins serve merchants that traditional providers cannot insure.

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