Chainalysis report shows AI agents made 138 million crypto payments via Coinbase's x402 protocol in one year, up from 1,500 in mid-2025, with U.S. wallets leading AI model spending.
AI & Agents ·
Autonomous AI agents have executed over 138 million cryptocurrency transactions through Coinbase's x402 protocol on Base, according to Chainalysis research, marking rapid growth from approximately 1,500 payments in mid-2025. The activity reflects the emergence of what the blockchain analytics firm calls "agentic commerce"—a use case gaining traction as developers allocate budgets directly to AI systems for purchasing computational resources, data feeds, and software tools. U.S.-linked wallets led spending on AI model inference at 88.1% of geographically traceable transactions, while China accounted for just 0.1%, though Chinese wallets dominated outlays for security and code-analysis services.
The overwhelming majority of these payments are minuscule in value: more than 87% ranged between one hundredth of a cent and 10 cents. This price point reflects a key advantage of stablecoin settlement—handling micro-transactions that traditional payment networks cannot economically support. Infrastructure support for agent payments is maturing, with Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, and Google all launching or expanding tools to facilitate autonomous spending.
Uncertainty remains about how much of this activity represents genuine autonomous agents versus automated scripts executing self-contained transactions. Competing analysis from TRM Labs has suggested that raw payment counts may overstate the prevalence of true agentic commerce, cautioning against interpreting transaction volume as definitive evidence of emerging use-case adoption.