Author: Han Qin, Jarsy CEO

A friend asked if payments between AI Agents necessarily need crypto?

Actually, it is not strictly necessary to use crypto; it's not that you can't operate without it. However, from a structural perspective, payments between AI Agents are indeed more easily realized with crypto. Visa and Mastercard can support some scenarios, but they have essential limitations.

If it's just AI making payments for people, then traditional payments are fully sufficient. If it's autonomous settlement between AI and AI, then the structural advantages of crypto are quite evident. The fundamental difference between the two lies in whether it is human-in-the-loop or a machine-native economy.

Can Visa and Mastercard support Agent payments?

Of course they can, but only in the agent model, where AI simply operates payment accounts on behalf of humans. For example, if AI helps you book a flight, it can call upon your credit card. AI can automatically purchase cloud resources linked to a corporate card, and AI SaaS can renew subscriptions using Stripe and Visa rails. These kinds of scenarios do not require crypto at all.

However, traditional payments have structural limitations. First, the account system is identity-bound, requiring risk control, auditing, and reversible transactions, which is typical of a human financial system. Secondly, traditional payments operate on a batch clearing system, with credit cards settling between T+1 and T+3, which involves many intermediaries and high fees, which is acceptable for human consumption but insufficiently fast for machine economies.

Additionally, traditional payment networks do not support high-frequency small payments, while the typical payment feature of an AI Agent economy involves settlement per second, micro-level payments, and API-level automatic triggers, whereas credit cards incur minimum fees and transaction costs, making them unsuitable for streaming payments.

Why do people say the Agent Economy is inherently biased toward crypto? It's not due to belief, but because the technical structure indeed matches. There is no need for identity permission; Agents can generate their own wallets, sign transactions, and transact without account opening approvals, which is critical for the machine economy. Otherwise, each AI agent would need to connect to a bank account, which is completely impractical. Additionally, real-time settlement via blockchain is near-instant, irrevocable, and without intermediaries, while Visa's card network is essentially an IOU system.

A straightforward analogy is that Visa and Mastercard equate to the HTTP of the human internet combined with a banking system, suitable for human-to-human and human-to-merchant interactions. Crypto rails equal to the TCP/IP of the machine internet combined with a native settlement layer, suitable for AI-to-AI automated economies in a trustless environment.

The most likely future reality should be layered collaboration. The upper layer comprises fiat currency entry points, including Visa and Mastercard and bank accounts, responsible for human funding sources and compliance KYC. The middle layer involves stablecoin settlements including USDC and tokenized deposits, responsible for rapid settlement, API payments, and cross-platform interoperability. The bottom layer is the Agent-to-Agent economy, including wallets, signatures, automatic payments, and machine protocols.

To determine whether an Agent payment scenario requires crypto, one must consider if there are ongoing autonomous transactions that do not require human authorization. If the answer is YES, then crypto has significant advantages; if the answer is NO, then traditional rails are sufficient.

That is also why the AI Agent economy and tokenization will be highly coupled. When Tokenization turns assets into APIs, and stablecoins turn money into APIs, the next step is for AI Agents to turn decision-making into APIs, combining all three into programmable capital markets.

Visa is the payment network of the human trust system, while crypto is the settlement layer of the machine trust system. The two will have a relationship of division of labor rather than one of upgrade or replacement.

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