AI-linked wallets are making millions of payments, but the vast majority carry little monetary value, according to a new report. BeInCrypto Intelligence’s State of AI Agent Payments 2026 tracked 6.4 million x402 payments across Base and Solana over 35 days, worth a total of just $119,947. More than 90% of those payments were below one cent.
The data suggests that transaction counts alone do not reflect genuine commercial demand. Some payments may involve testing or repeated service requests. “Micropayments could remain the majority of transactions while trading and treasury operations account for a growing share of the value moved,” said Amir Forouzani, co-founder and CEO of Puffer Labs.
Security incidents expose trust gap
In May 2026, a public post containing Morse-coded instructions caused an AI-linked wallet to send $175,000, of which roughly 80% was recovered. The transfer was valid on-chain, but the software had accepted instructions from a source it should never have trusted. The report identified two incidents involving $281,200 transferred to attacker-controlled wallets before recoveries. Neither required breaking a blockchain signature; the agents acted on instructions they should have rejected.
“A securely stored private key can still authorize a disastrous transaction if the agent has been manipulated by a malicious website, invoice or response from another service… Spending limits alone are insufficient. You also need to control whose instructions the agent accepts and enforce its permissions independently of the model,” Forouzani warned.
Markus Levin, co-founder of XYO, noted that one agent’s mistake can spread across many others using the same information. “When thousands of agents buy the same inexpensive feed and act on it at machine speed, one bad input gets repeated across all of them at once, and a spending cap set per agent does very little to contain that,” he said.
Finality and liability concerns
Benedikt Bünz, co-founder and chief scientist at Espresso Systems, pointed to another risk: agents may spend funds before an underlying transaction is final. “Ethereum transactions are only final after 16 minutes, i.e., they could be reverted before that. Agents either need to sit idle for that time or make their next move on a payment that could still be reversed. This exposure can have dangerous trickle-down effects at scale,” he said.
Who bears responsibility when an AI agent makes a wrong transaction remains unresolved. “Now agents have the technical capability to move money around and sometimes make their own decisions. How do we make sure that when agents make the wrong transactions, there are clear procedures and protocols to handle the downside risk?” asked Chandler Fang, co-founder of t54 Labs.
Institutional readiness scores low
In the report’s readiness framework, micropayments scored 60.7 out of 100, while institutional automation scored just 12.0. Limited disclosure of real-world results contributed to the low institutional score. Across 19 products reviewed, the 14 that handled money stayed within human-set limits.
Levin expects the next major opportunity to come from physical-world payments. “The next category of agentic payments I’d expect to grow is payments released once work is done in the physical world, such as a delivery being completed or a job finished on site, and those carry much larger amounts than an API call,” he said. Such payments would require proof of completion, permission rules enforced outside the AI model, and clear liability when a transaction goes wrong. Institutions still need evidence that those safeguards work at scale.
