AI’s “Bank Card” Has Caught the Attention of Giants

On March 18th, another blockchain mainnet went live.

It’s called Tempo, backed by Stripe and Paradigm. Stripe is one of the world’s largest online payment companies, handling $1.9 trillion in transactions last year; Paradigm is one of the largest venture capital firms in the 加密貨幣 industry. The two joined forces last year to invest $500 million in Tempo, valuing the project at:

$5 billion.

A $5 billion blockchain, not for trading tokens, not for DeFi, not for launching memes. On the day of its mainnet launch, Tempo’s most high-profile product was:

Enabling machines to pay machines.

This might sound abstract. You can think of it as AI now incurring costs for every step. Making an API call costs money, buying computing power costs money, pulling a batch of data from a database costs money…

But existing payment systems are all designed for humans. Bank accounts require ID cards, credit cards require facial recognition, Alipay needs SMS verification codes.

AI can’t pass any of these.

It can complete an entire workflow for you, but when it comes to the payment step, it has to stop and wait for a human to press “confirm.”

Thus, launching alongside the mainnet is an open protocol called MPP (Machine Payments Protocol), co-authored by Stripe.

Simply put, it establishes a set of rules for transactions between machines, covering how to request payments, authorize them, settle them, etc.

The envisioned scenario is that AI can autonomously spend money within preset limits without needing human approval for every transaction. On launch day, over 100 service providers had already integrated, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Shopify.

But Tempo wasn’t the only one working on this this week.

Within five days, Visa established a new department and launched an AI payment tool, Coinbase’s payment protocol underwent a major upgrade, Mastercard spent $1.8 billion to acquire a stablecoin company, and Sam Altman’s World released a toolkit specifically for AI identity verification.

Five giants squeezed through the same door in one week, rushing to open bank accounts for AI.

Two Paths, One Door

Tempo is focused on helping AI with settlement. But settlement is just one part of the payment system. For an AI Agent to truly spend money autonomously, it also needs payment tools, funding channels, and identity verification.

Here, traditional payment companies and crypto-native companies are competing for the pie using their respective strengths.

On March 18th, the same day Tempo’s mainnet launched, payment giant Visa also made its move. Its newly established Crypto Labs department released its first product: Visa CLI, a tool that allows AI Agents to initiate credit card payments directly from the terminal.

No API keys needed, no pre-registration required. If an AI needs to purchase a service while running a task, it can pay with a single command. Visa calls this “command-line commerce.”

Visa’s global card network connects billions of cards and tens of millions of merchants. If AI payments can run on this existing network, it doesn’t need to wait for any new infrastructure to mature.

Visa is extending the old path. Its competitor Mastercard chose another way: buying the road outright.

On March 17th, Mastercard announced the acquisition of London-based stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK for $1.8 billion. This is the largest stablecoin acquisition in the history of the crypto industry.

The purpose of this acquisition is also straightforward: if AI payments are to use stablecoins, then those stablecoins will flow through Mastercard’s pipes.

On the crypto-native side, the activity is equally intense.

Coinbase’s x402 protocol completed a major upgrade, expanding its payment scope from a few stablecoins to all ERC-20 tokens. It also released the MCP toolkit, allowing developers to integrate AI tools into the payment network with one click.

While the two sides seem to start from different points, their actions point in the same direction: traditional payment companies are embracing crypto, and crypto companies are embracing AI. Ultimately, crypto infrastructure is becoming the underlying pipeline for AI payments.

One piece remains. AI can spend money, but how does a merchant know if there’s a responsible human behind the AI making the payment?

On March 17th, World, co-founded by Sam Altman, released AgentKit, integrated with Coinbase’s x402. It does one thing: allows AI to prove, while making a payment, that a verified real person stands behind it. Merchants can confirm someone is responsible for the transaction but cannot see who that person is.

Five days, five companies. Settlement, channels, tools, protocols, identity—every link has been claimed.

AI Cake Divided, Only the Checkout Counter Remains

Over the past three years, most viable positions in the AI industry chain have been taken.

The model layer is the table for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and a host of Chinese companies. Computing power is locked down by Nvidia. The application layer, from coding assistants to search engines, is a red ocean…

Every layer is crowded, and the competitive barriers in each layer are getting higher.

But the payment layer remains relatively vacant.

It’s not that no one thought of it; the timing wasn’t right. AI Agent payments have a prerequisite: AI must first have the capability to independently complete an entire task chain. If it can only chat, doesn’t need to call APIs, doesn’t need to buy computing power, doesn’t need to hire other Agents to work, then payment isn’t a necessity.

Over the past year, this prerequisite has slowly begun to materialize.

OpenClaw enables AI to directly operate computers. The MCP protocol allows AI to connect to external services. The Agent capabilities of major large language models saw concentrated breakthroughs in the second half of 2025. AI has transformed from a “conversation tool” to a “work tool,” and work requires spending money…

The need to spend money has arrived, but the infrastructure for spending money does not yet exist.

This is why Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and Coinbase are all making moves simultaneously. For traditional payment companies, this is the first time they’ve gained a home-field advantage in the entire AI wave. They can’t build models, they can’t manufacture chips, but payments are what they’ve been doing for decades.

Visa’s global card network connects billions of cards and tens of millions of merchants. Mastercard covers over 200 countries. Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in transactions last year. If every AI expenditure flows through these pipes, the more capable AI becomes, the more money they make.

For crypto companies, the logic is somewhat different.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong once said something very direct: “AI can own a crypto wallet, but it can’t open a bank account.”

Every step of the traditional financial system verifies “who you are.” Opening a bank account requires an ID card, applying for a credit card requires facial recognition, every transaction needs an SMS verification code. AI is software, not a person; it can’t pass any of these checkpoints.

But crypto wallets don’t need these. A private key is an account. For an AI Agent, on-chain payments represent the path of least resistance.

Crypto or not, AI payments will be a new infrastructure-level market. The difference lies only in whose pipeline is more suitable for machines.

Road Built, Cars Not Here

At this point in the story, it seems everything is ready. The five giants are in position.

But there’s one number worth looking at.

Coinbase’s x402 protocol is currently the earliest and most widely adopted AI payment protocol. According to data from x402scan, the total transaction volume across the entire ecosystem in the past 24 hours was $65,400. 150,000 transactions, averaging less than 50 cents per transaction.

What kind of infrastructure is built for this number? Tempo is valued at $5 billion. Mastercard spent $1.8 billion acquiring BVNK. Visa specifically established a new department. Stripe personally wrote the protocol.

Infrastructure worth tens of billions of dollars is serving a market with a daily transaction volume comparable to a street-side bubble tea shop.

This seems to be the norm for all infrastructure businesses.

On the eve of the 2000 dot-com bubble, telecom companies laid millions of kilometers of fiber optic cables under the sea. After laying them, they found that global internet traffic only used about 5% of the capacity. Most of those companies went bankrupt, but the cables remained.

A decade later, video streaming and mobile internet filled those pipes. The road pavers didn’t make money, but the road was real.

AI payments are at this stage now. The logic of demand is sound: AI Agents are indeed becoming more capable, they do need to spend money autonomously, and they do need a new financial infrastructure.

Everyone is on the starting line, but after the starting gun fires, they find the track is temporarily empty except for themselves.

As for whose road ultimately succeeds, and when the first truly autonomous AI Agent transaction happens in your life, it might be faster than everyone expects, or it might be slower.

The only certainty is that this battle has already begun, and your wallet and mine might be the last to know.

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