Why Don't Card Fees Work for AI Agent Payments?

Brian Armstrong says a debit or credit card's typical minimum is about a 30-cent flat fee plus a percentage, so it does not really work for anything under a dollar, and paying 30 cents to send a one-cent payment does not make sense. He believes the last figures put about 76% of the agentic commerce transactions Coinbase is seeing under $0.30.

Those small payments are mostly information. A research shop might compile paywalled data, or one specialized agent might call another, almost like a tool call. He wants agents to hold their own spend accounts, the way an employee does, and he expects a stablecoin-backed card where an old checkout page still asks for one. A growing share of agent payments, in his account, already moves on x402, a protocol Coinbase incubated and contributed to the Linux Foundation, with Google, Cloudflare, and AWS working on it.