Stablecoins absorb AI agent micropayments as 98.6% of transactions settle in dollar stablecoins

Kim Jong-gwang, director and co-founder of DSRV, presents on "Agentic Commerce Trends and Global Corporate Strategies" at a seminar hosted by the Digital Consumer Research Institute. [Courtesy of DSRV]
Kim Jong-gwang, director and co-founder of DSRV, presents on "Agentic Commerce Trends and Global Corporate Strategies" at a seminar hosted by the Digital Consumer Research Institute. [Courtesy of DSRV]

"In the agentic commerce space, stablecoins are already functioning as the infrastructure for payments that card networks cannot handle."

Kim Jong-gwang, director and co-founder of DSRV, made the remarks at the Digital Consumer Research Institute's May seminar on May 29, where he presented on "Agentic Commerce Trends and Global Corporate Strategies." He said the data backing his assessment is no longer hypothetical — a full year's worth has already accumulated. The market in which AI agents autonomously search for products, process payments and fulfill orders on behalf of humans is taking shape rapidly, he said, and a significant portion of its payment layer is solidifying on top of stablecoins.

Data from the x402 ecosystem cited in the presentation showed that AI agents processed approximately 176 million payment transactions totaling $73 million between May last year and this May. The average transaction value was $0.48. Some 98.6% of payments settled in USDC, a dollar stablecoin, and 76% of transactions occurred below Visa's $0.30 floor fee — meaning the segment that is structurally unprofitable for card networks has become the natural operating ground for stablecoins.

Kim said stablecoins and AI agents "share the same traits" and listed five points of compatibility: stablecoins are programmable money that can express payment conditions, limits and verification directly in code; they enable real-time settlement unavailable on card networks; they are suited for micropayments; they can be held or transferred directly via a wallet without a bank account or identity verification; and they can reach global recipients without the friction of traditional foreign exchange or SWIFT systems.

The seminar also mapped out how traditional finance, crypto and Big Tech are converging on the agentic payments market.

Card networks and banks have moved to tokenize their settlement layers. Visa launched USDC settlement in the United States in December last year and is separately building stablecoin infrastructure for bank issuers through its Visa Tokenized Asset Platform, or VTAP. Mastercard supports four stablecoins — USDC, PYUSD, USDG and FIUSD — on its Multi-Token Network. JPMorgan rebranded and expanded its institutional blockchain payment and fund-transfer infrastructure from Onyx to Kinexys, which has processed a cumulative $1.5 trillion in on-chain payments at an average of $2 billion per day. Goldman Sachs announced in October last year that it would spin off its digital asset platform, GS DAP, into an independent company.

The digital asset industry, by contrast, has moved to embrace AI agents directly. Coinbase launched its own standard, x402, in May last year, and followed up with AgentKit and Agentic Wallets, advancing its position that every AI agent should have its own wallet. Robinhood co-founded the Global Dollar Network with Anchorage, Bullish, Galaxy, Kraken and Paxos in November 2024 to issue the dollar stablecoin USDG, which became one of the first stablecoins to comply with MiCA — the EU's crypto-asset regulation — and entered 30 EU countries in July last year. Kim said the crypto-native approach "starts from the assumption that an agent has its own wallet from the outset," and went on to say that it treats agents "as payment principals closer to legal entities."

Big Tech is working to set a standard that ties all payment pathways together. Google's Agent Payments Protocol, or AP2, unveiled in September last year, centers on two mechanisms: an Intent Mandate that locks in a user's instructions with a cryptographic signature, and a Cart Mandate that creates a tamper-proof record of the products and prices an agent has identified. The partner list spans the card industry — Mastercard, American Express, PayPal and Adyen — the crypto sector — Coinbase, the Ethereum Foundation and MetaMask — and East Asian payment networks including JCB, UnionPay and International. Kim called it "the first case in which the card camp, the crypto camp and East Asian payment networks have all signed onto a single standard at the same time," adding that "the partner list itself is the message."

Kim said the timing of all three camps' moves was no coincidence. "Everything came out within one to two quarters of the regulatory framework being put in place," he said, and went on to say that the industry "wasn't incapable before — it was waiting for the law." Once the legislation passed, standards, SDKs and payment networks launched within the same quarter, he said.

The U.S. Congress passed and signed the GENIUS Act — the federal regulatory framework for payment stablecoins — in July last year, establishing the basic structure for issuer eligibility, 100% reserves and consumer protection. In the fourth quarter alone, immediately after the law took effect, Stripe's ACP (co-developed with OpenAI), Visa's MCP server, Google's AP2 and Anthropic's Claude agent SDK were all released simultaneously. Visa launched USDC settlement in the United States, and Coinbase's x402 standard V2 and Stripe's Agentic Commerce Suite also emerged during that period.

Kim said South Korea is ready to move the moment its own legislation is in place. "The technical capabilities of domestic players — Naver, Kakao, Toss, KB, Shinhan, Kakao Pay and DSRV — are sufficient," he said. "They have the capacity to follow in the same quarter as global players across models, MCP, payment infrastructure and Web3 payment networks." The key, he said, is enacting the Digital Asset Basic Act. Kim said "core items — stablecoin issuance and payment use, liability allocation for agent-delegated transactions, and the definition of online retailers under the Electronic Commerce Act — are all waiting to be addressed."


dingdong@heraldcorp.com