AI Agents Spending Money Online? New Research Says Not Really

In brief

• TRM examined roughly $52.7 million across 198.9 million x402 settlements.
• Screening out self-payments and other anomalous flows left $25.62 million in likely commerce.
• Agents accounted for a small share under TRM’s models, which cannot conclusively distinguish them from scripts.

Most payment volume on Coinbase’s x402 protocol isn’t coming from AI agents, according to blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs.

TRM’s report, published Wednesday, examined $52.7 million across 198.9 million settlements processed by known x402 facilitators on Base, Solana, and Polygon since May 2025. After excluding self-payments and other anomalous flows, researchers estimated that just 0.6%–7.5% of the remaining commerce by value appeared to come from AI agents.

“The assumption is that a true agent explores across multiple services and products, while an address repeating the same price behaves more like a script hitting one service over and over,” the report said. “This is a deliberate modeling choice, and it may understate the space: many agents today could be single-purpose, paying one service repeatedly, which this test would read as a script.”

Launched by Coinbase in 2025, x402 integrates payments into web requests. The buyer receives a price and signs a payment authorization; a facilitator verifies it, submits the blockchain transaction, and pays the network fee.