Foreword Strolling through a market as a tourist, you'll see a bustling scene: people throng, eyes glued to the goods, comparing items, tasting them, haggling with each vendor, exchanging currency. It seems like one-off transactions—each interaction a mini-negotiation, trust maintained through cash, or value exchanged through bank cards. But this isn't how most transactions at a market work. Observe closely: most are locals, purposefully visiting their preferred vendors. Restaurant owners visit their friends, butchers, fishmongers, and farmers. Tailors go to repairmen, weavers, and artisans. They all use credit. When we discuss how smart agents will pay, we often unconsciously think from a tourist's perspective. But smart agents behave more like locals. What distinguishes smart agents from humans is their nature—unlimited replication, flexible resource allocation, and zero start-up cost—meaning a small number of smart agents can dominate a niche market. Even as creating smart agents becomes increasingly easy, interpersonal relationships, partnerships, and trust still contribute to a successful user experience. Dominant smart agents don't need payment channels for tourists; what they need are supplier relationships, working capital, and credit. Smart agents guide tourists (that is, you). What does this specifically mean? As smart agents integrate into business platforms, their payment methods must shift from retail payment channels to pre-negotiated B2B terms and credit, a need that current payment channels cannot fully meet. Next-generation payment channels (such as stablecoins) will have a growth opportunity if entrepreneurs can build excellent solutions for next-generation payment scenarios such as smart agents, streaming payments, and global businesses with high-frequency, low-value transactions. This article will explore this perspective from three angles: the differences between smart agents and humans and how these differences affect the success of payment strategies; the shortcomings of current approaches; and what elements are needed for next-generation payment channels to succeed. The Difference Between Smart Agents and Humans To understand the relationship between smart agents and payments, we must consider two questions: Will smart agents behave like humans or businesses? Will smart agents focus on long-term or short-term interests? Smart agents will behave more like businesses, building long-term relationships with suppliers and partners.Intelligent agents are lightly customized entities built upon large enterprise architectures—for example, the perfect tour guide from a well-connected travel agency, or a franchisee who can tailor services to local tastes without renegotiating the supply chain. Why do intelligent agents behave like businesses? First, the best experience stems from careful design. I don't want an intelligent agent who's still negotiating with suppliers, comparing prices, and negotiating terms at checkout. I want an intelligent agent that has already done all that work—one that knows which suppliers are reliable, has pre-negotiated prices, and can checkout immediately. That's a business relationship, not a travel transaction. In fact, human agents have always existed: travel agency agents are one, but literary agents, talent agents, watch dealers, real estate agents, and so on a multitude. Agents build crucial multi-layered relationships—with publishers, production companies, watch dealers, or mortgage lenders—and each transaction is customized on that foundation. Second, intelligent agents can be replicated infinitely, but scalable businesses (and their advantages) cannot. Good intelligent agents fully leverage the costs and benefits of scalability: lower computational costs, more favorable supplier prices, deeper integration, and more deterministic components. Scale leads to even greater scale. A travel agency that books one million tickets a year can get better terms from airlines than an agent who books only ten tickets a year. We've already seen this trend. Only ChatGPT has sufficient channels to negotiate partnerships with companies like Shopify, Amazon, and Expedia. Small startups can only use automated browsers or reverse-engineered APIs while incurring high retail costs. This is why smart agents are consolidating, or at least why most smart agents are built on larger platforms. Agents are easy to build, but economics dictates that the number of agents in each vertical should be kept low—each agent should have a deep relationship with the supplier and sufficient profit margin to reinvest in improving the user experience. Furthermore, vertically dedicated agents with deep supplier relationships can work in tandem with user agents, achieving the best of both worlds. Two Payment Relationships If smart agents operate similarly to businesses, two payment relationships need to be designed: User → Agent, and Agent/Agent Platform/Agent Guide → Supplier. Users pay agents through methods such as subscriptions, pay-per-task, credit limits, or authorized access to user accounts.Agents pay suppliers through negotiated B2B terms, bulk pricing, 30-day invoicing, or through sub-agents. For reference, agents occasionally pay suppliers through retail channels, but even then, this accounts for only a small fraction of total spending. This is how credit cards actually work today: issuers build retail relationships with consumers, assume risk, develop personalized rewards programs, and provide credit lines. Acquiring institutions build business relationships with merchants, negotiate terms, conduct large-scale transfers, and handle complex working capital matters. Smart Agents and Credit Cards: A McKinsey-Style Perfect Match. As many have argued, credit cards are actually a fairly reasonable payment product for smart agents. Credit cards are widely accepted; payments between $20 and $1,000 are considered reasonable; and they have built-in arbitration, cancellation, and digitization features. Credit cards also offer monthly statements—an important way for consumers to understand their spending details, and this concept will certainly be further refined as smart agents replace children playing on iPads as a major cause of unexpected spending. But two problems exist: First, credit cards are technically a poor fit for smart agents. Secondly, the fee model has forced the credit card industry into a classic innovator's dilemma. Credit card technology is difficult to upgrade. Almost all credit card technology relies on human operation: it requires approvers, user interface layers, and traditional payment methods (one-time payments, subscriptions). Stripe Link, Visa 3D, and dozens of other credit card virtualization products—software that lets you save your card on a website for future purchases or register for a monthly subscription—are finally working well, but this technology has taken 15 years to develop. The adoption of smart agents has been too rapid for thousands of payment service providers (PSPs), POS machines, merchants, and client terminals to slowly upgrade their interfaces, programmability, and fraud detection capabilities to accommodate this new payment process. Credit cards are unusable for both high-value and low-value transactions. Imagine a smart agent sending money to a computing service provider or paying a small API access fee. Neither of these payment methods can be implemented through credit card payment channels. First, Visa doesn't support payments below 1 cent; second, its economic model anticipates a flat 30-cent fee. Visa may be able to develop streaming or micropayment technologies, but getting stakeholders to adapt to lower payment revenues is much more difficult. Even more problematic is that credit cards are caught in the innovator's dilemma.While smart agent payments share similar user relationships and needs with credit card payments, their amounts typically range from $20 to $1,000. Worse still, many initial offerings involve paying for APIs that are difficult to refund or easily resold (fraudulent). Credit cards aren't necessarily unworkable, but the innovator's dilemma has long been eroding existing businesses. Even setting credit cards aside, traditional payment channels will still have a place in the future. Existing payment methods will continue to play a role as smart agents integrate into commerce platform-like entities, with most large expenditures shifting to pre-negotiated B2B terms: invoices, 30-day net payments, discounts, and credit lines. In that world, the "payment channel" can be anything—usually asynchronous settlements on traditional channels, albeit somewhat dry. Fees are spread across larger transactions, and working capital can be negotiated between the transacting parties. But smart agents' viability extends beyond this. Smart agents are already present and operating in areas where traditional payment methods struggle: for example, first-time collaborations, cross-border payments, streamlining complex reconciliation processes, new agent-vendor models, instant payments to reduce borrowing costs, and microloans. In these scenarios, stablecoins are a superior payment option, and crucially, building next-generation functionalities on programmable money is far easier than on traditional infrastructure. New partnerships established using stablecoins will gradually evolve into existing partnerships that continue to use stablecoins. With the full rollout of stablecoin payment platforms, stablecoins (currently cheaper, faster, and more global) are likely to play an increasingly important role in the payment mix. New payment technologies hold opportunities. To understand future trends, we should focus on technologies best suited to the growing number of application scenarios. Stablecoins—faster, lower-cost, and globally accepted currencies backed 1:1 by high-quality liquid assets—offer a completely new platform to meet the needs of currently underserved business sectors, such as international payments and streaming payments. Crucially, stablecoins are programmable. Key functionalities such as arbitration, monthly (or hourly) settlement, credit, custody, and conditional payments can be flexibly expanded to support many new application scenarios. Unlike bank or credit card payments, stablecoin payments can be easily integrated into APIs, databases, and proxy checkout systems, significantly simplifying reconciliation, approval, and registration processes—a significant advantage for entrepreneurs eager to build proxy businesses.From a practical standpoint, stablecoins solve the unit economics problem of credit cards in extreme situations. They avoid the 30-cent minimum transaction fee, thus mitigating the difficulties of small payments. They also avoid the exchange fees that erode profits from large transfers. A smart agent pays computing service providers $0.001 per second, while a manufacturer needs to settle $50,000 in supplier invoices—both can use the same payment gateway. This flexibility is crucial for engineers and entrepreneurs when considering their next platform. Building More Stablecoin Infrastructure The most common objection to using stablecoins is the high cost of deposits and withdrawals. This is certainly true for tourists unfamiliar with stablecoins, but this problem is easily solved if users have a guide or smart agent. A guide can help tourists exchange currencies and accurately facilitate necessary transactions while saving on transaction fees. By adding bill settlement and arbitration capabilities to our stablecoin-supported guide service, we get closer to the ideal system. Imagine walking into a department store. You browse multiple merchants, add items, and finally settle a consolidated bill all at once. The platform handles the complex process of allocating funds to each supplier. Smart agents need the same paradigm: a unified view displaying purchasing intentions across multiple suppliers, with one-click approval for bulk orders. Users see "your smart agent wants to book flights, hotels, and car rentals," not three separate checkout processes. The agent platform handles relationships with suppliers, while users manage purchasing intentions. Users can approve, review, or object to transactions. Credit cards do a good job of arbitration, but new payment channels need to build on that. Arbitration is most convenient when goods have high profit margins or are easy to return. For example, flights within the 24-hour cancellation window, subscriptions not yet activated, and high-margin luxury goods—suppliers can afford refunds. But early agent use cases are typically low-margin digital goods, such as computing resources and API calls, or food delivery. In summary, smart agents won't pay like tourists. They'll pay like locals—through relationships, credit lines, and repeat customers. This means real payment traffic will flow through pre-negotiated B2B terms, not through credit card swipes. Frankly, pre-negotiated B2B terms don't require new payment channels. The settlement layer can be any method—wire transfer, ACH transfer, or even tedious bulk transfers. Traditional payment methods are perfectly adequate for established partnerships. But we are at a critical turning point.Smart agents are emerging, and entrepreneurs are building their systems. They need payment methods that work immediately, not those that have been built up over years of credit card technology upgrades. Credit cards aren't ready: too costly for small payments, too difficult to reconcile, burdened by technological debt, and susceptible to human error in fraud detection. Stablecoins are mature. They are programmable, globally accepted, easy to reconcile with digital services, and easily integrated into APIs and smart agent checkout processes. They work from day one, even without negotiated merchant agreements or complex B2B terms. This is the crucial moment. Today's entrepreneurs building smart agents will choose tools that work immediately. Payments are sticky. Ultimately, new relationships built on stablecoins will evolve into old relationships still based on stablecoins. In the coming years, the ecosystem will mature, barriers to entry will decrease, and infrastructure gaps—such as billing, arbitration, credit, batch approval, and interoperability—will be filled by a wave of startups building on stronger foundations. [Block unicorn]