Visa and Artemis Analytics have jointly released a report titled “Agentic Payments from the Ground Up,” providing the first comprehensive data-driven analysis of the protocols, standards, and market structure forming around AI-initiated payments.
The report identifies two distinct categories of agentic transactions: macro-level payments, where agents act as proxies for human intent in completing purchases such as travel bookings or subscription management; and micro-level payments, characterized by high-frequency, sub-dollar exchanges between software systems — including API calls, data queries, and compute access — often valued at less than one cent per transaction.
The authors argue that the latter category requires fundamentally new payment infrastructure, and that this infrastructure is now beginning to emerge. The catalyst for this shift, the report contends, is not new technology alone but a demand threshold crossed by AI capability.
Since the mid-2025 releases of advanced frontier models, agents have been able to autonomously discover unfamiliar APIs, evaluate pricing, and execute payments without human intervention.
Two open-source protocols have moved to fill the resulting infrastructure gap. The x402 protocol — originally developed by Coinbase and Cloudflare and now governed by the Linux Foundation — has processed over $15 million in adjusted volume across 109.6 million adjusted transactions since its May 2025 launch, with Base blockchain accounting for approximately 90% of activity.
The Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), developed by Stripe and Tempo with Visa’s involvement, has recorded roughly 115,000 adjusted transactions and $25,000 in adjusted volume since its March 2026 launch, averaging around 4,000 transactions per day.
Despite early traction, the report identifies agent trust as the most pressing unsolved problem in agentic commerce. Unlike human buyers, software agents can execute hundreds of erroneous or compromised transactions before any oversight mechanism detects a failure.
According to the report, there are four distinct risk categories: mis-purchase errors, adversarial prompt injection attacks, unclear liability chains, and cascading failures in multi-agent transaction networks. Existing legal and regulatory frameworks, the authors note, were not designed for delegated machine-to-machine commerce, and no jurisdiction has established clear precedent for distributing responsibility across the human principal, agent platform, model provider, and merchant.
The study frames these gaps as the primary opportunity for established payments institutions. Card networks, issuers, and acquirers possess decades of accumulated infrastructure in identity verification, fraud detection, cross-border settlement, and dispute resolution — capabilities that crypto-native protocols currently lack at scale.
The report concludes that the institutions best positioned to define the next generation of agentic payment infrastructure are those that can combine protocol-native speed with compliance-grade trust, merchant distribution, and interoperability across both stablecoin and card-based settlement rails.
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