Recently I've been following discussions around AI Agents and stablecoins, and it's clear that the main player in payments is changing.

Think about it—if all shopping and service purchases are handed off to AI in the future, then the payment method has to change accordingly.

Previously it was manual: open a webpage, browse items, click pay, enter password. But with Agentic commerce, the whole picture shifts: AI finds services for you, automatically compares prices, then just pays directly.

And that's when the issues surface. Many machine services are charged per-use—calling an API costs a few cents, running computation costs a few cents. For these micro-transactions on traditional payments, fees could exceed the actual cost. The math just doesn't work.

Then looking at stablecoins again, they actually fit perfectly: fast settlement, 24/7 availability, and can support payments of just a few cents—basically purpose-built for machine transactions. But saying stablecoins will replace credit cards? That's not really realistic. Credit cards have built up serious infrastructure over decades: refunds, risk controls, consumer protection. They're just too powerful in e-commerce and everyday spending.

Where stablecoins can actually take off is in the machine economy: those growing numbers of API services, AI tools, automation software. Basically it comes down to:

➤ Traditional payments solve transactions between people and merchants,

➤ Stablecoins fill the gap for transactions between machines and machines.

If AI Agents really start participating in commerce at scale, stablecoins could gradually become the settlement layer underlying this whole system.

(The above is purely personal opinion, not investment advice, and constitutes no endorsement)