Coinbase and Visa are building competing payment infrastructures for a future where AI agents will handle more transactions than humans.
Coinbase’s approach: the x402 protocol:
Stablecoin payments are embedded directly into HTTP requests. An AI agent can pay for API access in USDC and continue working without human intervention. Supported by: Cloudflare, Circle, AWS, Stripe, Google.
Advantage: Agents cannot open bank accounts (KYC required), whereas a crypto wallet only requires a private key. Suitable for micropayments starting at $0.001, where Stripe’s standard fee ($0.30) exceeds the payment amount by 100+ times.
Current volumes: ~$28k/day, about half of which is test activity.
Visa and Mastercard’s approach:
They use existing card networks with cryptographic verification. Visa launched the Trusted Agent Protocol, and Mastercard processed its first live AI payment through Santander Bank.