a16z: The true opportunity for stablecoins lies not in disruption but in filling the gaps

Written by: Noah Levine, a16z Investment Partner

Translated by: Saoirse, Foresight News

A few weeks ago, Citrini Research published an article claiming that stablecoins will bypass Visa and MasterCard, directly causing stock prices of card organizations to plummet. The crypto community cheered.

The logic sounds straightforward: AI agents will optimize every transaction, and fees are a kind of “tax,” which stablecoins can bypass.

I spend all my time in the crypto space and hope this is correct, but most of it is wrong.

Not because stablecoins are unimportant, but because the real opportunity isn’t in replacing bank cards. It’s in serving merchants who find it difficult to access traditional card payments.

Bank Cards Will Dominate Most of the Market

Citrini’s argument is based on a hypothesis: that AI agents, freed from human habits, will proactively eliminate card network fees.

But bank cards are more than just transfer tools. They provide unsecured credit, pre-authorization for uncertain transactions, and fraud protection through chargeback rights.

Stablecoins can transfer money, but they can’t do the rest.

Suppose your AI agent books a hotel for you, and the hotel turns out to be completely different from the pictures.

With a bank card, you can dispute the charge and get your money back.

With stablecoins, once the money is gone, it’s gone.

82% of Americans hold reward credit cards (such as cashback, points, airline miles, hotel points), and there are up to 18 billion cards in circulation worldwide.

For most transactions, consumers won’t voluntarily give up the protections and rewards of credit cards to use a payment method that offers no benefits and is irreversible.

Fraud detection is another huge advantage of card networks: they can run real-time models on billions of transactions.

Stablecoins currently lack a comparable network-level anti-fraud layer.

Small payments are often seen as a weakness of bank cards, but card networks have long adapted to such mismatched transactions.

Visa, for example, has processed over 2 billion transit ticket transactions by aggregating multiple swipes into daily settlements.

The card industry has never abandoned any type of transaction; it always invents new products to cover them.

Another common objection: “But AI agents can’t hold cards.”

But AI agents are just new devices.

Your phone, watch, or computer all hold independent tokens linked to the same card, just like Apple Pay.

Phones have never done KYC; they only hold your tokens, and the same applies to AI agents.

Visa has issued over 16 billion tokens, and AI agents will use these tokens too.

Visa’s smart commerce framework is currently in pilot, and Mastercard’s Agent Pay is now available to all US cardholders.

Stripe, in partnership with OpenAI, has integrated an intelligent commerce protocol with Etsy, and over a million Shopify merchants are about to go live.

The conclusion is clear:

For existing merchants and consumers, bank cards are almost destined to dominate AI-driven commerce.

The opportunity for stablecoins lies elsewhere — with merchants that haven’t yet appeared.

Merchants That Haven’t Yet Emerged

Every platform migration creates a wave of merchants that current payment systems can’t serve.

When eBay first launched, individual sellers couldn’t open merchant accounts, so PayPal served them.

Shopify grew from 42,000 merchants in 2013 to 5.5 million today.

Stripe’s early clients were often startups that didn’t even exist yet.

The pattern has always been the same: winners serve merchants that existing giants can’t insure.

The AI boom will accelerate this process faster than any previous platform shift.

Last year alone, 36 million new developers joined GitHub.

In YC’s Winter 2025 batch, 25% of company codebases are over 95% AI-generated.

On the popular AI coding platform Bolt.new, 67% of the 5 million users aren’t even developers.

People who couldn’t produce production-level code two years ago are now releasing software.

They are both buyers and sellers of developer services.

Imagine this:

An average developer spends 4 hours using AI tools to create a financial data visualization tool for a public company. No website, no terms of service, no legal entity.

Another developer’s AI agent calls it 40,000 times in a week, earning $40 at $0.1 per call, all without anyone clicking a checkout page.

I see developers creating such tools every week.

Their first question is always: How do I get paid?

For most, the answer is: You currently can’t.

Existing payment providers find it difficult to onboard these merchants.

It’s not a matter of technology; it’s that once a payment provider takes on a merchant, they assume the risk.

If the merchant commits fraud or initiates大量 chargebacks, the provider bears the loss.

Tools without websites, legal entities, or records are almost impossible to pass risk controls.

The system operates as designed, but it wasn’t built for these scenarios.

Of course, payment providers can adapt — they have before.

But it took PayPal 16 years from launch to industry’s first underwriting guidelines for payment service providers.

And these new merchants need to start accepting payments now.

For them, accepting stablecoins is like street vendors only accepting cash.

It’s not that cash is better; it’s that these merchants have always struggled to get approved for bank card acceptance.

In this gap, stablecoins are the only viable solution.

Although wallet experiences are still rough and compliance frameworks are evolving, protocols like x402 can embed stablecoin payments directly into HTTP requests:

No merchant accounts, no processors, no onboarding, no chargeback liability.

These merchants aren’t choosing between stablecoins and bank cards.

They’re choosing between stablecoins and not getting paid.

New Business Models Will Emerge Here

Every wave of new merchants will eventually be absorbed by traditional payment systems — and this time is no different.

But the order always is: merchants appear first, risk controls follow later.

In the meantime, stablecoins are the infrastructure.

Bank cards serve merchants that existing providers can insure;

Stablecoins serve those they cannot.

The next wave of commerce will emerge from this gap.