x402: Each transaction is less than 1 cent. Traditional cards can’t handle micro-payments like this at all. Does Visa’s latest report amount to paving the way for stablecoins? Until the scope of authorization and responsibility is clarified, large-scale deployment will still have to wait.

Wu Shuo learned that Visa and Artemis jointly released a report saying that AI agents have begun autonomously booking travel, purchasing computing power, and calling data services, and machine payments are moving from concept to real commercial scenarios. Since going live in May 2025, x402 has completed about 109.6 million transactions, with an adjusted transaction value of about $15 million. The average payment per transaction is less than 1 cent, and the fixed fees of traditional bank cards are not economical for such micropayments. In the future, bank cards may continue to handle routine e-commerce payments, while stablecoins are better suited for high-frequency machine payments; the biggest current obstacle is not settlement technology, but rather that AI agents’ authorization, responsibility allocation, and dispute-resolution mechanisms are not yet clearly defined.