One wallet sent $266K to an agent card store to dodge a $3.95 fee.

AGENT PREPAID CARDS · 8 MIN

Laso Finance, an Austin money services business, sells prepaid cards and gift cards to AI agents that settle in stablecoins. Bitrefill sells them gift cards and mobile top-ups the exact same way. Over a 30-day window, the public x402 ledger recorded $269,322 flowing into Laso, and 98.8% of that volume came from a single wallet. The economic target here is the toll for turning raw balances into a payment instrument a merchant checkout will accept. American Express sets that toll at $3.95 per card, a margin that went unchallenged only because buying a prepaid card used to require a human standing at a checkout counter.

Anyone who wants to buy something online without exposing a primary bank card has always had a simple workaround: buy a prepaid card at a drugstore counter or a digital gift card on a retailer's site, eat the activation fee, and type the 16-digit number into the checkout page.

Laso Finance turns that errand into an API call for software.

An AI agent hits Laso's endpoint, gets a quote, and settles the bill in USDC over x402, a protocol that lets software pay a server per request in stablecoins without an account or a card on file. Seconds later, the agent receives a live card number, expiration date, and security code, or a redeemable gift card code across more than 3,000 retail brands.

The pricing table is short and aggressive. USA prepaid cards load anywhere from $5 to $1,000, run strictly at US merchants, and carry a 0% issuance fee. A $100 card costs the agent exactly $100. Branded retail gift cards carry a flat 4.8% fee, and Laso will also route funds directly to a bank account via ACH for 0.25%.

Laso Finance LLC operates out of Austin, Texas, states it is registered with FinCEN as a money services business, and lists backing from Colosseum. Yet not a single page we opened names the founders. Under its agent terms of service, effective October 18, 2026, the human who owns the agent is solely responsible for setting spending limits. For operators using its managed wallet, Laso provides two controls: a hard cap on individual payments and a velocity cap over a rolling 24-hour window.

Turning raw balances into a payment instrument a checkout will accept has always carried a toll. Legacy gift card issuers and prepaid card programs collect that toll. American Express charges $3.95 per card for gift cards bought on its website, which is 7.9% of a $50 card and 3.95% of a $100 card. Netspend, a reloadable prepaid card, charges up to $3.95 each time cash is loaded at a store. Behind both is the fee the merchant's bank pays the card's bank on every purchase, and the Federal Reserve counted $340.49 billion of purchases on general use prepaid cards in 2023, which earned the issuing banks $5.24 billion, or 1.54% of the value. The purchase fee lasted because the buyer had no faster way to get a card number, and because a seller that lets one person buy more than $10,000 of prepaid access in a day must run an anti-money-laundering program.

What changed is that the buyer can now be software paying in stablecoins, and a seller holding stablecoins can issue a virtual card with no cashier. The x402 ledger shows it happening at modest size. Across every x402 seller, 3,005,725 payments worth $1,562,514.89 came from 34,790 buyer wallets in the last 30 days. The last seven days carried $673,133.13, which is 1.85 times an even weekly share of the month, while the count of payments ran only 12% above an even share, so a small number of large payments drove the jump, and the most recent single day carried just $10,408.57. Laso ranked first among listed sellers by dollars over the 30 days, and Bitrefill's agent storefront grew from $99 in the first full week of the period to $714 in the latest.

Visa is moving toward agents rather than away from them: it announced Intelligent Commerce Connect on April 8, 2026, letting agents pay with Visa and non-Visa cards. The announcement is about paying with cards, not about the fee to buy one.

For the guerrilla builder, the price advantage is in the fee to load the card: a seller that charges nothing to load, as Laso does on its USA card, has to earn its income when the card is spent or from its other products, and the $3.95 a card is the part an agent buyer never pays.

A mention here is listed, never sold.

LISTED · PREPAID CARDS AND GIFT CARDS FOR AGENTS

Laso sells USA prepaid cards at a 0% fee, gift cards at 4.8%, and bank payments by ACH at 0.25%, all paid by agents in USDC on Base or Solana. The x402 ledger shows $269,322.20 in 325 payments from 101 buyer wallets over 30 days. In the 331 payments we pulled, one Solana wallet paid $254,562.19, or 98.8%, across 36 payments with a median of $2,756.88, and every other wallet in the sample paid $2,999.90 in total. The operator is Laso Finance LLC of Austin, Texas, which lists [email protected] as its agent contact.

Reach them · @LasoFinance · laso.finance

LISTED · GIFT CARDS AND TOP-UPS PRICED BY THE CALL

Bitrefill, run by Airfill Prepaid AB in Stockholm, sells gift cards, mobile top-ups, and travel eSIMs to agents paying USDC on Base, and it charges for each step of a purchase: $0.002 to search, $0.001 for product detail, $0.002 to create an invoice, and $0.001 to check its status, then the face amount. The ledger shows $1,536.48 from 117 wallets in 30 days, rising every full week from $99 to $714 while paying wallets went from 31 to 50. One wallet's single $499.82 payment made up 32.6% of the dollars.

Reach them · @bitrefill · agent docs

To see how the unit economics actually work, trace a single $100 transaction across three different checkout paths.

How does a provider make money when it charges 0% up front? The answer sits on the back end. When that $100 prepaid card is actually spent at a merchant, the merchant's bank pays interchange to the bank that issued the card. Using the Federal Reserve's 2023 average for general-use prepaid cards (1.54%), spending that $100 card generates roughly $1.54 in backend interchange. A card seller that charges zero load fees typically splits that $1.54 with its issuing bank. Because Laso does not name its issuing bank or disclose its revenue-share terms, the public record does not show how much of that backend cut Laso keeps.

Bitrefill monetizes through a completely different model. Instead of a percentage load fee, Bitrefill charges per API call. Completing a full purchase requires $0.006 in x402 API calls on top of the card's face value. On the $1.11 purchase typical of its smaller buyers, six-tenths of a cent equals a 0.54% fee. Even better for high-frequency agents, once a buyer wallet pays for an API route once, it can call that endpoint for free for the next 30 days.

Yet customer concentration matters far more here than either price list.

Concentration (how much revenue depends on a single buyer) is the very first risk a CFO checks, and Laso's on-chain ledger is extreme. A single wallet accounted for 98.8% of Laso's dollar volume. Strip that one whale out of the sample period, and Laso's volume drops from $257,562 down to $2,999.90, leaving just 1.2% of the total.

The blockchain cannot tell us who controls that wallet. It could be a wholesale reseller, an institutional partner, a single large power user, or Laso routing its own treasury funds.

The payment sizes, however, leave a forensic trail. That wallet's median payment was $2,756.88, which sits well above the $1,000 maximum load limit on Laso's USA prepaid card. Its largest single transfer was $23,563.10, which exceeds the maximum limit of every product on Laso's menu except one: bank transfers via ACH, which cap out at $50,000. Remember that these figures represent raw on-chain transfers over x402, and on-chain volume is not audited revenue.

For either storefront to build a durable business, the base of smaller, everyday agent buyers has to expand. That weekly active wallet count is the real metric to watch: paying wallets per full week climbed from 21 to 37 at Laso, and from 31 to 50 at Bitrefill.

The narrowest wedge here is an automated petty cash drawer built for one specific class of agent.

Small marketing agencies already run autonomous agents that buy stock photography, top up ad credits, and spin up paid software trials. Today, a human employee still has to enter a shared corporate card into each of those checkouts.

The Build: Stand up an x402 middleware service that intercepts a purchase request from an agency's agent and evaluates it against hard deterministic rules set by the agency owner: one single merchant per card, a card balance that matches the exact penny of the quoted checkout price, and a strict daily spend ceiling. Once the request passes inspection, your service calls Laso's /get-card endpoint, which charges a 0% load fee and restricts spend strictly to US merchants. You then hit the partner /get-card-data route to pass the sixteen-digit card number, expiration date, and security code directly back to the agent, and nothing more.

The Margin: Charge a flat $0.50 per virtual card issued. That is our pricing assumption, positioned directly underneath the $3.95 toll American Express charges to mint a single gift card. Because Laso's USA card load fee is 0%, your $0.50 fee is clean margin. A single mid-sized agency issuing 2,000 exact-change cards a month generates $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue.

The First Customer: Cold call the operations lead at a boutique digital agency who loses two days at the end of every month untangling a single shared Amex statement and has no way to tell which agent bought what.

RECON · TWO TERRAINS WHERE THE TOLL STILL STANDS

Two ideas where an incumbent still collects on every payment and no builder is standing yet, found this week with the sources attached.

RECON · GOVERNMENT PAYMENT FEES

Indiana's 2026 payment program flyer from Tyler Technologies lists a card convenience fee of $0.40 plus 1.96%, the Idaho State Tax Commission charges 2.5% through PayIt, and Wisconsin DMV adds up to 2.35%, while Idaho and Wisconsin charge nothing to pay by ACH. A $400 payment, our example, costs $8.24 extra by card in Indiana and $10 in Idaho. Payment vendors are paid per card payment and have no reason to promote the free option, which requires someone to type bank details into each agency's portal. The build is an agent that pays registrations, permits, and taxes via ACH. Charge $1.50 per payment. The first customer to call is a fleet manager who registers 40 vehicles a year.

RECON · PARKING APP FEES

Evanston raised its parking app fee from $0.35 to $0.47 per session on July 1, 2026, and began charging $0.30 to load the app wallet, and San Francisco proposed in 2025 to raise its user fee from $0.10 to $0.35 under new contracts with Park Mobile and Arcadis. On a $2 session, our example, the Evanston fee adds 23.5%. The app vendors are paid per transaction, so the fee moves up as contracts renew, and a vendor cannot offer a cheaper channel without cutting its own pay. The build is an x402 endpoint a city runs beside its meters, so a driver's agent pays per session in stablecoins. Charge 5 cents per session. The first customer to call is Evanston's parking office.

bitrefill/agents is Bitrefill's own agent skill and Claude Code plugin, which connects an agent to Bitrefill's commerce MCP server so it can buy gift cards, mobile top-ups, and eSIMs and pay with crypto, Lightning, USDC through x402, or an account balance. It has 27 stars and an MIT license, and its last commit landed on October 20, 2026. It is worth an hour because its default supports the control this issue argues for: each purchase is confirmed with the user unless the owner opts into autonomous buying, making it a working reference for where the human approval step belongs in an agent that spends money.

In fraud cases, prepaid and gift cards come up again and again because value becomes a code that anyone holding it can spend, and a delivered code cannot be pulled back (Bitrefill's agent documentation states that digital goods are non-refundable once fulfilled). That makes an agent store a target in two ways. A thief who takes over an agent, by stealing its wallet key or by planting instructions in a page it reads, will empty the wallet into gift cards, and a single wallet putting large sums through a stablecoin to card service is the pattern the anti-money-laundering rules expect a seller to watch. The ledger shows one wallet paying Laso $254,562.19 in 36 payments, and we cannot say whose it is. The control is a hard cap per payment and per rolling 24 hours, set by the owner and enforced outside the agent, which Laso's managed wallet already supports.

FLINT Scout runs that check on every spend for a penny.

PASS IT ON

The engineer on your team who just gave an agent a wallet should read the concentration numbers before that agent buys its first gift card.

NEXT ISSUE

Speech sold by the call: the dTelecom gateway sells speech to text to agents for $0.004 a session minute through x402, against Twilio's $0.024 a minute for batch transcription, and the ledger shows $36,384.90 paid to it in 30 days by just 30 wallets. Next week we look at who those wallets are, whether 30 buyers make a business, and what Twilio and Deepgram charge for the same minute.

SOURCES

x402scan ecosystem totals · x402scan Laso Finance seller page · x402scan Bitrefill seller page · x402scan dTelecom seller page · Laso Finance home page · Laso Finance price list · Laso Finance agent terms · Laso Finance llms.txt · Coinbase CDP Bitrefill plugin docs · American Express gift card fees · Netspend fee schedule · Federal Reserve 2023 interchange data · FinCEN prepaid access FAQ · Visa Intelligent Commerce Connect · Indiana payment program flyer · Idaho State Tax Commission e-pay · Wisconsin DMV fees · Evanston parking fee notice · SFMTA parking app fee document · dTelecom x402 price list · Twilio voice pricing · Deepgram pricing · GitHub bitrefill/agents