If you’ve watched my videos or read my X account for some time, you’ve undoubtedly heard me talking about agentic payments as the future of crypto.
The premise is this: agent to agent payments are going to require something much faster than TradFI.
Already, cryptocurrency concerns are working on building these very systems. Algorand, Hedera, Near Protocol and many others themselves or through intermediaries are testing and building the systems that will empower this idea.
Why should you care? Simple. Agents using low-fee chains will be making a ton of transactions - far more than humans could dream of - and those will mean more revenue from transaction fees for the blockchains that power them.
BUT… what if the narrative is false?
We always must be stress-testing our thesis. And this latest X post definitely did just that.
Armstrong is telling you AI agents need crypto because they can’t use banks, and nobody’s noticing that Visa, Mastercard, Google, Stripe, and PayPal already built the answer.
Visa completed hundreds of agent-initiated transactions in live pilots last year. Mastercard launched Agent Pay with tokenized credentials across all U.S. issuers. Google shipped an entire Agent Payments Protocol. Santander and Mastercard ran Europe’s first regulated AI agent payment two weeks ago.
The “agents can’t open bank accounts” framing sounds clean, but it skips what’s actually happening. Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol uses cryptographic signatures to authenticate AI agents the same way it authenticates human cardholders. The agent gets a token linked to your account. No bank account needed for the agent. No KYC for the bot. The human already passed that gate.
This tells you everything about how the payments industry views this race. Coinbase’s x402 protocol has processed 50 million transactions since February, which sounds like scale until you realize Visa processes that volume roughly every 90 minutes. Visa is working with 100+ partners across six continents. Mastercard launched an entire Agent Suite in January with 4,000 advisors. These companies process 3.4 trillion transactions annually and they’re retooling all of it for agents.
The real constraint for AI agent payments is liability. When an agent books the wrong flight or buys the wrong size, who eats the cost? Visa’s Ramachandran said it directly: agents are now a fifth party in the dispute chain. Crypto has no dispute chain. No chargebacks. No consumer protection. For a billion agents making mistakes at machine speed, that’s a feature for Coinbase and a problem for the person whose agent just bought 400 economy seats to Mumbai.
Coinbase wins the long tail. Agent-to-agent micropayments, DeFi, on-chain operations where no merchant exists. That’s a real market. But “agents can’t use banks” is a 2024 take running on a 2026 timeline where Visa is telling merchants to prepare for AI agent checkout by holiday season.
The incumbents aren’t sleeping through this one. They’re spending more, moving faster, and they already have the merchants. Crypto becomes a rail for agents. Visa and Mastercard are betting their entire product roadmap it won’t be the primary one.
What if he’s right?
After all, many of the things we thought with crypto turned out not to be the perfect solution it promised. While Visa and Mastercard are adopting crypto, it hasn’t led to an explosion of crypto usage and adoption.
There are those times when crypto seems like a solution in search of a problem.
But a few considerations?
He mentions Google’s agentic payment standard. Algorand and other crypto companies are included in that standard.
He mentioned the issue with finality. But I think it’s a feature, not a bug. That secures agents against clawbacks and hacks. And a dispute can be resolved with a new transaction.
A major factor is permissionlessness: That means being able to run agents and work and transact in the world without gatekeepers. He mentions Stripe and PayPal — but Stripe came along because internet payments were so bad only major businesses could offer credit card payments! And even Stripe with its fees opens the doors to lower-cost alternatives.
Just like both tradFI and crypto exist now — why couldn’t both exist in agentic payments?
I also have a hard time seeing, say, Visa lowering its fees. Crypto will have an opening on cost that Visa won’t be able to compete with.
We’ll soon know which thesis is right. My sense is that it will be a little bit of both.
But time will tell.
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