AI agents made 138 million crypto payments via Coinbase’s x402, Chainalysis finds

Autonomous software is already spending crypto at scale. A Chainalysis report released Wednesday says AI agents ran more than 138 million payments through Coinbase’s x402 protocol on the Base blockchain, buying data, computing power and access to AI models.

What x402 is doing

x402 is a payments protocol incubated by Coinbase that lets software pay for digital services automatically with cryptocurrency. Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and others have backed the standard, and Coinbase has started letting business customers accept payments from AI agents.

Chainalysis’ figures come from its Inside North America’s $3 trillion crypto economy: Agentic commerce accelerates research. Transaction counts alone do not prove how much of the flow is genuine commercial demand — earlier work also flagged possible artificial activity — but the geography and ticket sizes are striking.

Who is paying for what

• U.S.-linked wallets accounted for 88.1% of geographically identified payments for AI model inference, versus 0.1% for Chinese-linked wallets.
• Eric Jardine, Chainalysis’ head of research, told CoinDesk one explanation may be that Chinese developers lean more on open-weight models such as DeepSeek and Qwen, so they buy less metered inference.
• Chinese-linked wallets, by contrast, made up about 90% of identified payments for security and code-analysis services, much of it toward AgentLisa, an AI smart-contract auditing tool.

Why stablecoins fit micropayments

More than 87% of the x402 payments Chainalysis analyzed were worth between a hundredth of a cent and 10 cents — amounts that are uneconomic on traditional card networks. In July, the protocol processed roughly 75 million payments worth about $24 million over 30 days.

Wallets first funded in Q2 2026 were also quicker to become active: 89.3% received further funding within 30 days (versus 70.6% for Q3 2025 first-funded wallets), and the average time from funding to first x402 payment fell from 73 days in late 2025 to 18 minutes in Q3 2026.

For the basics of on-chain finance, see What is DeFi? and What is a stablecoin?.