Stablecoins Could Become the Native Payment Layer for AI Agents

Forbes examines how AI agents are becoming economic actors and why traditional payments fail them. AWS, Coinbase, Stripe and Visa are already building infrastructure: the x402 protocol, wallets with spending limits and stablecoin settlement. Visa reported an annualized stablecoin settlement run rate of about $7 billion.

• AWS, Coinbase and Stripe launched AgentCore Payments for autonomous agent payments
• The x402 protocol lets agents pay for content and APIs via an HTTP 402 response
• Visa reported an annualized stablecoin settlement run rate of about $7 billion
• Circle is building agent wallets with spending limits, allowlists and time-bounded sessions