Autonomous AI Agents Completed Over 138 Million Crypto Payments

According to a Chainalysis report, autonomous AI agents conducted over 138 million crypto payments through Coinbase's x402 protocol. These transactions, executed on the Base platform (Coinbase's layer two network), represent one of the fastest-growing segments of cryptocurrency usage. More than 87% of these transactions are micropayments, ranging from one-hundredth of a cent to 10 cents, making them convenient for stablecoin transactions but challenging to execute through traditional banking systems.

The growth dynamics of the x402 protocol usage are impressive: while in mid-2025 the total number of payments was approximately 1,500, by the third quarter of 2026 it exceeded 138 million. This development was made possible by the active implementation of new infrastructure supported by companies like Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and Google, which began supporting payments from AI agents. Additionally, Coinbase launched tools allowing agents to trade and conduct transactions and started accepting payments from agents for business clients.

The report also notes that 88.1% of payments were associated with wallets registered in the United States, while only 0.1% were related to Chinese wallets. However, analysts cautioned about interpreting the data, as the figures reflect only identifiable activity, not the entire global market. Separately, BlackRock highlights attention to autonomous agents as a potential new source of demand for cryptocurrency: according to the company's head of digital asset research, Will Su, AI agents could create significant demand for frequent, low-value payments at any time of day.

Meanwhile, according to competing crypto transaction tracking company TRM, a significant portion of the apparent agent activity on similar rails may represent scripts or self-deals rather than genuine autonomous agents. This is a reminder that raw transaction count metrics can overstate the actual volume of agent commerce.