Translation by: Block unicorn

Introduction

As a tourist wandering through the marketplace, you will see a lively scene: people bustling about, staring intently at the merchandise, comparing various products, tasting, bargaining with each vendor, and exchanging currency. It looks like a one-time transaction—each interaction is a small negotiation, trust is maintained through cash, or value is exchanged through credit cards.

But this is not how most transactions in the marketplace operate. Upon closer observation: most people are locals who purposefully go to their favorite merchants. The restaurant owner visits his friends, the butcher, the fishmonger, and the farmers. The tailor goes to the mechanic, the weavers, and the craftsmen. They all use credit.

When we discuss how smart agents will pay, we often unconsciously think from a tourist's perspective.

But smart agents will behave more like locals. The difference between a smart agent and a human lies in its characteristics—unlimited replication, flexible resource allocation, zero start-up costs—which means that a few smart agents can dominate niche markets. Even as creating smart agents becomes easier, relationships, partnerships, and trust still play an important role in crafting successful user experiences. Dominant smart agents do not require payment channels for tourists; what they need is supplier relationships, operating capital, and credit. Smart agents can guide tourists (that is, you) forward.

What does this mean in practice? As smart agents consolidate into business platforms, the payment methods of smart agents must shift from retail payment channels to pre-negotiated B2B terms and credit, something that current payment channels fail to meet completely. If entrepreneurs can build excellent solutions for next-generation payment scenarios (such as smart agents, streaming payments, and high-frequency low-value transactions on a global scale), then next-generation payment channels (like stablecoins) will find opportunities for development.

This article will explore this perspective from three aspects: the differences between smart agents and humans, how these differences affect the winning payment strategies; the shortcomings of current methods; and what elements need to be built into next-generation payment channels to be successful.

Differences Between Smart Agents and Humans

To understand the relationship between smart agents and payments, we must consider two questions: Do smart agents behave like humans or businesses? Do smart agents focus on long-term benefits or short-term gains?

Smart agents will resemble businesses, establishing long-term relationships with suppliers and partners. Smart agents are lightly customized entities built on top of large corporate frameworks—such as a perfect guide provided by a well-connected travel agency, or a franchisee that can adjust service offerings to local tastes without renegotiating supply chains.

Why do smart agents behave like businesses?

First, the best experiences stem from careful design. I do not want a smart agent that is still negotiating with suppliers, comparing prices, and discussing terms at the checkout. What I want is a smart agent that has already completed this work—a smart agent that knows which suppliers are reliable, has pre-negotiated prices, and can check out immediately. That is a business relationship, not a tourist transaction.

In fact, human agents have long existed: travel agency agents are certainly one, but literary agents, performing arts agents, watch dealers, real estate agents, and many others also abound. Agents establish key multi-channel relationships—with publishers, production companies, watch dealers, or mortgage institutions—where each transaction is customized based on these relationships.

Secondly, smart agents can replicate endlessly, but scalable businesses (and their advantages) cannot be replicated. Excellent smart agents fully exploit the cost and benefits associated with scalable business: lower computing costs, better supplier pricing, deeper integration, and more certain components. Scale brings more scale. An agent that books one million plane tickets a year can secure better terms from airlines than an agent that only books ten tickets annually.

We have already seen this trend. Only ChatGPT has enough channels to negotiate with companies like Shopify, Amazon, and Expedia. Small startups can only use automated browsers or reverse-engineered APIs while also paying high retail rates.

This is why smart agents will consolidate, or at least why most smart agents will build on larger platforms. Agents are easy to build, but the economics dictate that the number of agents in each vertical should remain low—each agent should build deep relationships with suppliers and have sufficient profit margins to reinvest to enhance user experience. Moreover, exclusive agents in verticals with strong supplier relationships can synergize with user agents, achieving a win-win effect.

Two Types of Payment Relationships

If the operation of smart agents resembles that of businesses, two types of payment relationships need to be designed: User → Agent, and Agent/Agent Platform/Agent's Guide → Supplier.

Users pay agents—this can be done through subscriptions, task payments, credit limits, or authorized access to user accounts. Agents pay suppliers through negotiated B2B terms, bulk pricing, 30-day net invoices, or via sub-agents. Based on current enterprise spending, agents occasionally pay suppliers through retail channels, but even then, this portion of spending makes up only a small fraction of total expenditures.

This is the reality of how credit cards operate today: issuers establish retail relationships with consumers, assume risks, create personalized rewards programs, and provide credit limits. The acquiring institutions establish business relationships with merchants, negotiate terms, make large-scale transfers, and handle complex operating capital matters.

Smart Agents and Credit Cards: A McKinsey-like Perfect Match

As many have said, credit cards are actually quite a reasonable payment product forsmart agents. Credit cards are widely accepted; payments between 20 and 1000 dollars are considered reasonable; and credit cards have built-in arbitration, cancellation, and digitization features.

Credit cards also offermonthly billing—this is an important way for consumers to understand their spending details, and asthe rise of smart agents replaces kids playing on iPads as the main cause of unexpected expenses, this concept will surely be further refined.

However, there are two problems: first, credit cards, in technical terms, have a poor fit for smart agents. Secondly, the charging modelforces the credit card industry into a typical innovator’s dilemma.

Difficulties in Upgrading Credit Card Technology

Almost all credit card technologies rely on human intervention: requiring approvers, user interface layers, and traditional payment methods (one-time payments, subscriptions). Stripe Link, Visa 3D, and dozens of othercredit card virtualization products—those that allow you to save cards on websites for future purchases, or register cards for monthly subscriptions—have finally started to work well, but the technology took 15 years to develop.

The adoption of smart agents is so rapid that thousands of payment service providers (PSPs), POS systems, merchants, and client terminals cannot slowly upgrade their interfaces, programmability, and fraud detection capabilities to accommodate this new payment process.

Credit Cards Are Unusable in Both High and Low Transactions

Imagine smart agents remitting payments to computing service providers or paying small API access fees. Neither of these payment methods can be achieved throughcredit card payment channels. First, Visa does not support payments below $0.01; second, its economic model expects a fixed fee of $0.30. Visa may develop streaming or micropayment technologies, but it is even harder to get stakeholders to adapt to lower payment income.

Compounding the problem, credit cards are trapped in the innovator's dilemma. Althoughsmart agent payments and credit card payments have similar user relationships and needs, the amounts typically exceed the $20 to $1000 range. Worse yet, many initial solutions involve paying for APIs that are difficult to refund or prone to resale (fraud). Credit cards are not unviable, but the innovator's dilemma has long weakened the existing market.

Even aside from credit cards, traditional payment channels will still have a role in the future.

Existing Payment Methods Will Still Play a Role

As smart agents consolidate into entities resembling business platforms, most large expenditures will shift to pre-negotiated B2B terms: invoices, 30-day net payments, discounts, and credit limits. In that world, “payment channels” can be anything—often asynchronous settlements conducted through traditional payment channels, albeit somewhat tedious. Fees will be amortized over larger transactions, while operating capital can be negotiated between the transaction sides.

But the survival space for smart agents is not limited to this. Smart agents have now emerged and are operating in areas where traditional payment methods struggle: such as first-time collaborations, cross-border payments, simplifying complex reconciliation processes, new agent-supplier models, instantaneous payments to reduce borrowing costs, and microloans.

In these scenarios, stablecoins are the better payment option, and importantly, building next-generation functionalities based on programmable currencies is much easier than on traditional infrastructures. New partnerships established with stablecoins will gradually evolve into old partnerships that continue to use stablecoins. With the comprehensive rollout of stablecoin payment platforms, stablecoins (which have already become cheaper, faster, and more global) are likely to occupy an increasingly important position within payment compositions.

New Payment Technologies Hold Opportunities

To understand future trends, we should focus on those technologies best suited for the ever-growing application scenarios.

Stablecoins—a faster, cheaper, globally accepted currency backed 1:1 by high-quality liquid assets—are a whole new platform that can meet the needs of currently underserved business domains such as international payments and streaming payments. Importantly, stablecoins are programmable. Key features like arbitration, monthly (or hourly) settlement, credit, custody, and conditional payments can be flexibly expanded to support many new application scenarios. Unlike payments through banks or credit cards, stablecoin payments can be easily integrated into APIs, databases, and agent checkout systems, significantly streamlining reconciliation, approval, and registration processes—which is crucial for entrepreneurs eager to build agent businesses.

Practically, stablecoins solve credit cards' unit economics issues in extreme cases. They do not carry a $0.30 minimum fee, thereby avoiding the micropayment dilemma. They also do not erode profits from larger transfers due to exchange fees. A smart agent can pay a computing service provider $0.001 per second while a manufacturer needs to settle a $50,000 supplier invoice, both using the same payment channel. This flexibility is vital for engineers and entrepreneurs when considering the next building platform.

Building More Stablecoin Infrastructure

The most common objection to using stablecoins is the high costs of deposits and withdrawals. For tourists unfamiliar with stablecoins, this is indeed the case, but if users have guides or smart agents accompanying them, this issue can be easily solved. Guides can assist tourists in exchanging currency and facilitate necessary transactions accurately while saving on transaction costs.

By incorporating billing and arbitration functionalities into our stablecoin-supporting guide services, we get closer to an ideal system.

Imagine the scenario of walking into a department store to shop. You browse multiple merchants, add products, and finally settle a single merged bill. The platform handles the complex process of allocating payments to each supplier. Smart agents also need the same model: a unified view displaying purchasing intentions across multiple suppliers and capable of approving bulk orders with one click. What users see is “Your smart agent wants to book flights, hotels, and rental cars,” rather than three separate checkout processes. The agent platform is responsible for managing relationships with suppliers, while users are responsible for handling purchasing intentions. Users can approve, review, or dispute the transactions.

Credit cards excel at arbitration, but new payment channels need to build upon this foundation. Arbitration is most convenient when product margins are high or returns are easy, for example, flights within a 24-hour cancellation window, subscriptions not yet effective, or high-margin luxury goods—suppliers can absorb refunds. But the application scenarios for early agents often involve low-margin digital goods, such as computing resources and API calls, or food delivery.

Conclusion

Smart agents will not pay like tourists. They will pay like locals—through relationships, credit limits, and repeat customers. This means that genuine payment flows will occur through pre-negotiated B2B terms rather than through card swiping. Frankly, pre-negotiated B2B terms do not require new payment channels. The settlement layer can be any means—wire transfer, ACH transfer, or mundane bulk transfers. Traditional payment methods are perfectly adequate for established partnerships.

Yet we are at a critical turning point. Smart agents are emerging, entrepreneurs are building their systems, and what they need are payment methods that can take effect immediately, rather than those that will only materialize after years of credit card technology upgrades. Credit cards are not ready: too costly for micropayments, too difficult for reconciliation, constrained by technical debt, and human factors also affect fraud decisions. Stablecoins have matured. They are programmable, globally accepted, easy to reconcile with digital services, and can be seamlessly integrated into APIs and smart agent checkout processes. They can also function from day one without negotiated merchant agreements or complex B2B terms.

This is a pivotal moment. Today's entrepreneurs building smart agents will choose tools that can operate effectively right away. Payments are sticky. Eventually, new relationships built on stablecoins will evolve into old relationships that still rely on stablecoins. In the coming years, the ecosystem will mature, barriers to entry will decrease, and the inadequacies of infrastructure—such as billing, arbitration, credit, bulk approvals, and interoperability—will be filled by a wave of startups based on more robust foundations.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。