AI Agents Made 138 Million Crypto Payments in a Year. Most Were Tiny
Summary
Chainalysis reports more than 138 million cryptocurrency payments through Coinbase-incubated x402, up from about 1,500 in mid-2025. Most were tiny transactions for services such as computing, web data and coding tools. The report says US-linked wallets dominated identifiable payments for AI model inference, while cautioning that its data covers only x402 activity. Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase and Google are developing or supporting agent-payment tools. However, rival research suggests some apparent agent activity may be automated scripts or self-dealing, so transaction counts may overstate genuine autonomous commerce.
