Last week, I did something that completely broke my defenses: I used a bank card I've had for five or six years to pay for an API call fee for a newly launched AI model—$0.01. And the result? When the bill came out, I was dumbfounded. In addition to that one cent, the bank charged an extra $0.30 as a handling fee. Even more ridiculous, it takes three days for the transaction to clear.

Just imagine how absurd this is: an AI system might need to make thousands or even tens of thousands of these micro-decisions and payments per second. If all of them went through the traditional banking process, the fees alone would bankrupt it, not to mention the snail-paced settlement times that would paralyze the entire computation chain. This experience made me realize—those seemingly powerful payment giants are actually panicking in the face of the AI era.

To really explain why these traditional payment players are falling behind, and why Web3 solutions like KITE have a chance to break through, we need to dig into their underlying logic.

Traditional payment systems—whether it's credit card networks or interbank transfers—are fundamentally built around "centralized trust" and "large-amount settlements." Their systems were designed with the assumption that every transaction must be verified by multiple parties, go through clearing processes, and pass risk control checks, with a bunch of institutions and review steps in between. For big-ticket purchases like buying a house or a car, this mechanism works well. But when it comes to "ultra-micro payments" and "millisecond-level real-time settlements" in AI scenarios, the whole architecture becomes a burden.

Just imagine: an AI agent...