Autonomous AI agents have made more than 138 million cryptocurrency payments through x402, according to a new report from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. x402 is a protocol incubated by Coinbase that lets software pay for online services automatically.
The report is part of Chainalysis’s annual Geography of Crypto series. This edition focuses on North America’s $3 trillion crypto economy and describes “agentic commerce” as one of the sector’s fastest-emerging use cases.
How Fast AI Agent Payments Grew
The payments take place on Base, Coinbase’s layer-2 network. Cumulative payments through x402 rose from about 1,500 in mid-2025 to more than 138 million by the third quarter of 2026.
Developers are giving AI agents their own budgets to spend. The agents use that money to buy computing power, live web data and coding tools as they need them.
Most of the payments are very small. More than 87% fell between a hundredth of a cent and 10 cents each.
According to the report, these are the kind of micro-transactions that stablecoins can handle. Traditional card payment systems cannot process payments this small.
US Wallets Lead AI Model Spending
The United States accounts for most of the activity. American-linked wallets made up 88.1% of geographically identifiable payments for AI model inference, the report found.
China’s share of that category was just 0.1%. However, Chinese-linked wallets made up most of the spending on security and code-analysis services.
Chainalysis warned against reading too much into the gap between the two countries. The firm said the figures only capture identifiable x402 activity, not the entire global market.
The report comes as more companies build tools for AI agent payments. Visa, Mastercard and Stripe have all moved to support payments made by AI agents.
Coinbase has released a tool that lets agents trade and transact, and it has started letting business customers accept agent payments. Google has also unveiled a dedicated protocol for agent payments.
BlackRock has pointed to autonomous agents as a possible new source of crypto demand. Will Su, the firm’s head of digital assets research, told Chainalysis the company is watching the space closely. He said AI agents could potentially create “meaningful demand for frequent, low-value payments around the clock.”
Not everyone reads the numbers the same way. Earlier research from rival crypto tracing firm TRM suggested that much of the apparent agent activity may be scripts or self-dealing, not genuine autonomous agents.
TRM’s findings suggest that raw transaction counts can overstate how much real agentic commerce is happening. Chainalysis’s figures count payments, not whether each one came from a true autonomous agent.
The Chainalysis findings were reported on October 14, 2026. Around that time, Bitcoin was trading near $81,000, down 1.8% over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data.
