Autonomous AI agents have made more than 138 million cryptocurrency payments through x402, a Coinbase-incubated protocol that enables software to pay for online services automatically, according to a new Chainalysis report on North America's crypto economy.
The payments are predominantly micro-transactions: more than 87% fell between a hundredth of a cent and 10 cents, a size range that stablecoins can handle but traditional card systems cannot. Developers are increasingly allocating budgets to AI agents to purchase computing power, live web data, and coding tools as needed.
Rapid Growth on Base Network
Activity through x402 on Base, Coinbase's layer-2 network, grew sharply from approximately 1,500 payments in mid-2025 to more than 138 million by the third quarter of 2026. Chainalysis framed this trend as "agentic commerce," one of the sector's fastest-emerging use cases.
Geographic Concentration
American-linked wallets accounted for 88.1% of geographically identifiable payments for AI model inference, compared with 0.1% for China. However, Chinese-linked wallets represented the majority of spending on security and code-analysis services. Chainalysis cautioned that these figures capture only identifiable x402 activity rather than the entire global market.
Maturing Infrastructure
The infrastructure supporting agent payments has expanded rapidly. Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe have moved to support AI-agent payments, Coinbase has rolled out tools for agents to trade and transact, and Google unveiled a dedicated agent-payments protocol. BlackRock's head of digital assets research told Chainalysis the firm is monitoring the space closely, noting that AI agents could potentially create meaningful demand for frequent, low-value payments.
Activity Questions
Earlier research from blockchain analytics firm TRM suggested that much of the apparent agent activity on these rails may consist of scripts or self-dealing rather than genuine autonomous agents, indicating that raw transaction counts may overstate the actual volume of agentic commerce taking place.
