AI Agents Made 138 Million Crypto Payments in a Year. Most Were Tiny

In brief

• Autonomous AI agents have made over 138 million crypto payments through Coinbase’s x402 protocol on Base, per Chainalysis, as “agentic commerce” emerges as one of crypto’s fastest-growing use cases.
• The payments are tiny—87%+ fell between a hundredth of a cent and 10 cents—the kind of micro-transactions stablecoins handle but card rails can’t.
• The boom rides maturing infrastructure from Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase and Google, though earlier research suggests much agent activity may be scripts, not genuine agents.

AI agents are beginning to spend real money, and increasingly they’re paying in crypto.

That’s the picture from a new Chainalysis report, which found that autonomous AI agents have made more than 138 million cryptocurrency payments through x402, the Coinbase-incubated protocol that lets software pay for online services automatically.

The report, part of the blockchain analytics firm’s annual Geography of Crypto series and focused on North America’s $3 trillion crypto economy, frames “agentic commerce” as one of the sector’s fastest-emerging use cases.

The growth has been steep. Cumulative payments through x402 on Base, Coinbase’s layer-2 network, rose from roughly 1,500 in mid-2025 to more than 138 million by the third quarter of 2026, as developers increasingly hand AI agents their own budgets to buy computing power, live web data and coding tools on the fly. The payments are tiny: more than 87% fell between a hundredth of a cent and 10 cents, the kind of micro-transaction stablecoins can handle but traditional card rails cannot.