Autonomous AI agents executing millions of micro-transactions per day cannot be efficiently served by credit cards, bank wires, or ACH transfers designed for humans - and a growing cluster of stablecoin companies is building financial infrastructure to fill that gap.
The argument, made by executives at Circle Internet, Coinbase, and Catena Labs, is that programmability and composability of dollar-pegged stablecoins make them the most practical payment rail for bots transacting in fractions of a cent around the clock.
The crypto industry has a clear financial interest in that conclusion, but the technical constraints it identifies are real.
The Problem With Legacy Rails
Erik Reppel, head of engineering for the Coinbase Developer Platform and a co-founder of x402 - an open payments protocol designed for AI agents - described the core issue: credit cards require an existing relationship with a card network, and spinning up virtual cards per agent is operationally cumbersome.
Stablecoin wallets are open. Any developer can create as many as needed, fund them with a defined amount, and isolate each agent's spending capacity from a user's broader finances.
"Anyone can program stablecoins," Reppel said. "Anyone in the world can spin up as many wallets as they want, and then just use wallets as the way to fully isolate funds for an agent."
What Agents Actually Need
Dante Disparte, Circle's chief strategy officer, identified two specific stablecoin properties that matter for agentic commerce: programmability - the ability to set conditions on when a transfer executes - and composability, meaning a chain of automated financial actions can be triggered on token receipt.
Neither property is native to credit cards.
Sean Neville, co-founder of Circle (USDC) and now founder of Catena Labs, which raised $18 million in seed funding led by a16z crypto in May 2025, acknowledged that the AI developer community holds a negative view of cryptocurrency broadly, associating it with memecoins and speculative schemes.
Stablecoins, he argued, have achieved enough separation from that reputation to be evaluated on their technical merits.
The more pressing near-term obstacle, Neville said, is protocol fragmentation. Multiple agent payment standards are competing for adoption, and without convergence, building interoperable agent marketplaces remains difficult. He called for a universal open standard - analogous to SSL for browser security - that no single company owns.
Squaring regulated money transmission with agents that have no financial identity remains an unsolved compliance problem. Catena's approach is programmable policy controls embedded at the payment layer, enforcing spending rules regardless of wallet infrastructure.