Chainfeeds Summary:
The role of Web3 is not to replace traditional payments, but to provide the underlying capabilities for the Agent era, including verifiable identity, programmable clearing, and global stablecoins.
Article source:
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/EkrizVVJq0BlEt6UuJHGkg
Article Author:
IOSG Ventures
Opinion:
IOSG Ventures: Real-world merchants span e-commerce, subscriptions, SaaS, travel, content payment, and enterprise procurement, representing trillions of dollars in real-world demand and serving as the core value source for AI Agents' automatic price comparison, renewal, and procurement. In the short term, mainstream consumption and enterprise procurement will continue to be dominated by the traditional fiat currency payment system. The key obstacle to the scalability of stablecoins in real-world commerce is not technology, but rather regulatory and institutional issues: KYC/AML, tax compliance, consumer protection, and the identification of "illegal stablecoin payments" in merchant accounting; simultaneously, irreversible payments lack mature dispute resolution mechanisms. These structural limitations make it difficult for stablecoins to be implemented in highly regulated industries such as healthcare, aviation, e-commerce, government, and public utilities. Relatively speaking, their applications will be prioritized in scenarios with lower regulatory pressure or native on-chain applications, such as digital content, cross-border payments, Web3 native services, and the machine economy (M2M/IoT/Agent). This also constitutes the window of opportunity where Web3 native intelligent agents are most likely to achieve a breakthrough in scale first. Despite short-term limitations, stablecoin regulation has been accelerating its institutionalization since 2025: the US stablecoin bill has gradually reached bipartisan consensus, Hong Kong and Singapore have established stablecoin licensing frameworks, the EU's MiCA has officially come into effect, Stripe supports USDC, and PayPal has launched PYUSD. This clarification of the regulatory structure signifies that stablecoins are being accepted by the mainstream financial system, opening up policy space for future cross-border settlements, B2B procurement, and the machine economy. The core of Agentic Commerce is not replacing one payment mechanism with another, but rather entrusting the execution of "order placement—authorization—payment" to AI agents, allowing traditional fiat currency payment systems (AP2, authorization certificates, identity compliance) and stablecoin systems (x402, CCTP, smart contract settlement) to each leverage their respective strengths. This is not a zero-sum game between fiat currency and stablecoins, but a structural opportunity of parallel development and complementary capabilities: fiat currency continues to support human commerce, while stablecoins accelerate machine-native and on-chain native scenarios, together forming the dual engines of the Agentic Economy. The underlying protocol stack of agent-based commerce consists of six layers: discovery, trust, ordering, authorization, payment, and delivery, forming a complete machine commerce chain from "capability discovery" to "payment delivery." The discovery layer uses the A2A Catalog and MCP Registry to solve how agents discover and understand callable services; the trust layer relies on ERC-8004 to build verifiable on-chain identities, reputations, and execution records; the ordering layer uses ACP to provide structured product and settlement descriptions, ensuring merchants can fulfill their obligations; the authorization layer, centered on AP2, binds user intent, confirmation, and payment authorization to a real identity system; the payment layer consists of a traditional fiat currency track and a stablecoin track (x402) running in parallel; the delivery layer lacks a unified standard, representing the largest gap in the current protocol stack. Around these layers, institutions such as Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Stripe, Ethereum, and Coinbase have proposed key protocols, collectively piecing together the next generation of discoverable, verifiable, and settleable agentic commerce infrastructure.
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