a16z: The Real Opportunity for Stablecoins Lies Not in Disruption, but in Filling Gaps
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a16z: The Real Opportunity for Stablecoins Lies Not in Disruption, but in Filling Gaps
The opportunity for stablecoins lies with merchants that have yet to emerge.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Noah Levine, Investment Partner at a16z
Translated by Saoirse, Foresight News
A few weeks ago, an article published by Citrini Research claimed stablecoins would bypass Visa and Mastercard—causing card network stocks to plummet. The crypto community cheered.
The logic sounds clean: AI agents will optimize every transaction, and fees are just a “tax” that stablecoins can sidestep.
I live and breathe crypto all day—and I wish this narrative were true. But most of it is wrong.
Not because stablecoins aren’t important—but because the real opportunity isn’t replacing cards; it’s serving merchants who can’t access traditional card payments at all.
Cards Will Capture the Vast Majority of the Market
Citrini’s argument rests on one assumption: AI agents—freed from human habits—will actively optimize away card network fees.
But cards are more than just transfer tools. They provide unsecured credit, pre-authorization for uncertain transactions, and fraud protection via chargeback rights.
Stablecoins can move value—but they can’t do any of the rest.
Imagine your AI agent books a hotel room for you—and the room looks nothing like the photos.
With a card, you can dispute the charge and get your money back.
With stablecoins? Once the money’s gone, it’s gone.
82% of Americans hold rewards credit cards (offering cashback, points, airline miles, hotel points, etc.), and over 18 billion cards circulate globally.
For the vast majority of transactions, consumers won’t voluntarily give up purchase protections and rewards for a payment method that offers neither benefits nor reversibility.
Fraud detection is another massive advantage for card networks: card systems run models across billions of transactions in real time.
Stablecoins currently lack anything comparable—a network-level anti-fraud layer.
Micropayments are often cited as a weakness for cards—but card networks have long adapted to mismatched transaction types.
Visa already processes over 2 billion transit tickets annually by batching multiple swipes into daily settlements.
The card industry has never abandoned any category of transaction—it always invents new products to cover them.
Another objection: “AI agents can’t hold cards.”
But agents are simply new devices.
Your phone, watch, and laptop each hold independent tokens pointing to the same card—just like Apple Pay.
Your phone never underwent KYC—it just holds your token. Agents work the same way.
Visa has already issued over 16 billion tokens—and agents will use them too.
Visa’s Intelligent Commerce Framework is in pilot; Mastercard’s Agent Pay is now live for all U.S. cardholders.
Stripe and OpenAI’s joint Agent Commerce Protocol is already integrated with Etsy—and over one million Shopify merchants are coming soon.
The conclusion is clear:
For existing merchants and consumers, cards are almost certain to dominate agent-driven commerce.
Stablecoins’ opportunity lies elsewhere—in merchants that haven’t even emerged yet.
Merchants That Haven’t Emerged Yet
Every platform shift spawns a wave of merchants that existing payment systems can’t serve.
When eBay launched, individual sellers couldn’t open merchant accounts—PayPal served them.
Shopify grew from 42,000 merchants to 5.5 million in 13 years.
When Stripe launched, many of its future customers hadn’t even been founded yet.
The pattern is consistent: winners serve merchants that incumbent giants can’t underwrite.
The AI wave will spawn such merchants faster than any prior platform shift.
Last year alone, 36 million new developers joined GitHub.
In Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch, 25% of companies have codebases over 95% AI-generated.
On Bolt.new—a popular AI coding platform—67% of its 5 million users aren’t developers at all.
People who couldn’t write production-grade code two years ago are shipping software today.
They’re both buyers *and* sellers of developer services.
Imagine this:
An average developer uses AI tools to build a financial data dashboard for public companies—in four hours. No website. No terms of service. No legal entity.
Another developer’s AI agent calls it 40,000 times per week—at $0.001 per call—generating $40 in revenue. Not a single checkout page was ever clicked.
I see developers building tools like this every week.
Their first question is always: “How do I get paid?”
For most, the answer is: You can’t—yet.
Existing payment providers struggle to onboard these merchants.
It’s not a technical limitation—it’s risk. Once a provider approves a merchant, it assumes liability for that merchant’s actions.
If the merchant commits fraud or triggers high chargeback volumes, the provider bears the cost.
A tool with no website, no legal entity, and no audit trail stands virtually no chance of passing underwriting.
The system is working exactly as designed—just not for this use case.
Payment providers *could* adapt—as they have before.
But it took PayPal 16 years—from launch to the industry’s first underwriting guidelines for payment service providers.
These new merchants need to get paid *now*.
For them, accepting stablecoins is like a street vendor accepting only cash.
It’s not that cash is better—it’s that such vendors have historically struggled to qualify for card acceptance.
In this gap, stablecoins are currently the only viable solution.
Even with clunky wallet experiences and evolving compliance frameworks, protocols like x402 can embed stablecoin payments directly into HTTP requests:
No merchant account. No processor. No onboarding. No chargeback liability.
These merchants aren’t choosing between stablecoins and cards.
They’re choosing between stablecoins and getting paid at all.
New Commerce Will Emerge Here
Eventually, every wave of new merchants gets absorbed by traditional payment systems—and this one likely will too.
But the sequence is always the same: merchants emerge first; risk controls follow.
In the gap between those two phases, stablecoins serve as infrastructure.
- Cards serve merchants that payment providers *can* underwrite;
- Stablecoins serve merchants that payment providers *cannot* underwrite.
The next wave of commerce will be born in this gap.
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