Last week I did something that was both hilarious and frustrating—I paid $0.01 in API fees for a new AI model using an old-school bank credit card. When the bill came, I was dumbfounded: besides that one cent, there was a $0.30 processing fee. Even more ridiculous, it takes two or three days for the payment to clear.

Think about it: when AI is running, it might need to handle thousands or even tens of thousands of these micro-transactions per second. If every call worked like this, the fees alone would drain it dry, not to mention the snail-paced settlement. This whole mess made me realize: traditional payment systems are a joke in the age of AI.

Why are those payment giants dropping the ball on AI payments? You have to look at their roots.

Credit card networks and bank transfers were built for “large transactions” and “multi-party endorsements” from the start. Every payment has to go through multiple checkpoints: identity verification, risk control, multi-party settlement… For big purchases like houses and cars, this system works. But what does AI need? Ultra-high-frequency micropayments and millisecond-level real-time settlement. When traditional systems face these demands, they just can’t cope.

That’s where Web3-native solutions like KITE come in. They don’t involve the cumbersome middleman processes—instead, they settle directly peer-to-peer on the blockchain. Fees? Almost negligible. Settlement time? Done in seconds. For AI agents, this is the kind of payment infrastructure that actually works—payments won’t drag down performance, and profits won’t get eaten up by fees.

Put simply, traditional payments are products of the industrial era, while AI requires digital-native solutions. In this transformation, the lumbering giants are still stuck in place, while agile new players are already moving ahead.