Coinbase's payment protocol, x402, logged 138 million payments from AI agents by the third quarter of 2026, Chainalysis found1. In mid-2025, that count sat near 1,5002. Most of the money moved in dimes and pennies. Over 87% of the payments ran between a hundredth of a cent and 10 cents, Chainalysis said.
Wallets moved faster too. In late 2025, a new wallet waited 73 days before its first x402 payment1. By the third quarter of 2026, that wait fell to 18 minutes. Software that once sat idle now spends within the hour.
Read fast, the number confirms a story everyone wants to believe. Software agents seem to buy things by themselves now, faster than anyone forecast a year ago. Brian Armstrong, Coinbase's co-founder and chief executive, reads the trend that way. “AI being a megatrend takes nothing away from crypto, because AI agents will need programmable money rather than traditional banking rails,” Armstrong said in July 20263.
x402 itself tells a plainer story. Coinbase built the protocol so any program, an agent or a plain script, can answer a price with a stablecoin payment2. Noah Hodge, a researcher at TRM Labs, the blockchain intelligence firm, tested that gap directly4. “x402 was designed for agentic commerce, but nothing in the protocol requires an agent,” Hodge wrote.
Hodge sampled $52.7 million across 198.9 million x402 transactions sent since May 20254. He screened out obvious noise and kept $25.62 million as likely commerce. Of that smaller pile, Hodge judged between 0.6% and 7.5% as the work of an actual agent. At the high end, real agents moved $1.92 million. The remaining $23.70 million moved through scripts, repeat shoppers, or wallets Hodge left unidentified.
Dollars in sampled x402 commerce TRM Labs judged agentic versus scripted
- Tied to an agent: $1.92M
- Scripts, testers: $23.7M
Source: TRM Labs [4].
Read the chart as a table
| Item | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Tied to an agent | $1.92M | TRM Labs' high estimate, 7.5% of the sample |
| Scripts, testers | $23.7M | The remaining $25.62 million TRM Labs sampled |
Crypto has read a volume number wrong before. In February 2022, Chainalysis flagged 262 wallets that had sold an NFT to an address they funded themselves, more than 25 times each5. Those wallets had padded NFT trading volume through 2021, before anyone checked the wiring behind it. A high count measured activity. The NFT volume count left out who, or what, generated that activity.
The same gap shows up by country. Wallets linked to the United States made 88.1% of x402's identifiable AI model inference payments, Chainalysis found1. China-linked wallets made just 0.1% of those same payments, and roughly 90% of payments for security and code-analysis services. Eric Jardine, Chainalysis' head of research, offered one reading. “One possible explanation is that Chinese developers are more inclined to use open-weight models such as DeepSeek and Qwen, reducing their need to purchase metered inference services,” Jardine said.
Share of identifiable x402 payments by wallet-linked country and payment category
Source: CoinDesk [1].
Read the chart as a table
| Item | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. wallets: AI inference | 88.1% | China-linked wallets made 0.1% of these same payments |
| China wallets: security checks | 90% | Chainalysis called this figure roughly 90% |
Stablecoins carry almost every dollar on this rail. USDC, issued by Circle, settled 99.6% of the $52.68 million TRM Labs measured, $52.47 million of it4. Stephanie Cohen, Cloudflare's chief strategy officer, called that fit deliberate. “Stablecoins are particularly well suited to the kinds of transactions we expect AI agents to make at first,” Cohen said1.
Who pays for this rail? The human who funds the wallet pays first, whether a script or an agent spends the balance. Who profits? Coinbase holds 50% of Circle's residual revenue on USDC reserves. Its share grows when that USDC sits on Coinbase's own platform, under terms Circle disclosed in its 2025 stock filing6.
That revenue grows with every x402 payment settled in USDC, agent or script. Who carries the risk? A developer may call a payment "agentic" in a pitch deck. TRM Labs can trace most of that volume to code running on its own.
x402 works: Coinbase's rail settles a payment in seconds, for a fraction of a cent, at any hour1. What it carries today is mostly scripts. The agent economy its backers describe stays ahead of the data. Readers who want the next real number, ahead of the next headline count, can get it from The CryptoLately.com Desk. Sign up for The Signal at cryptolately.com/newsletter.
Sources
- Olivier Acuna, "AI agents make 138 million crypto payments as U.S. dominates spending on AI models," CoinDesk, Oct. 14, 2026, https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/10/14/ai-agents-make-138-million-crypto-payments-as-u-s-dominates-spending-on-ai-models
- Chainalysis, "North America: Inside the Growth of Agentic Commerce," Chainalysis, Oct. 14, 2026, https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/north-america-crypto-adoption-2026/
- Helen Partz, "Coinbase CEO Touts AI Agents Driving Crypto Adoption," Cointelegraph, July 27, 2026, https://cointelegraph.com/news/coinbase-ceo-agentic-finance-base-100-million-aifi-transactions
- Noah Hodge, "Who's Actually Paying? Measuring AI Agent Payments Onchain," TRM Labs, Sept. 9, 2026, https://www.trmlabs.com/trm-tech-blog/whos-actually-paying-measuring-ai-agent-payments-onchain
- Chainalysis, "Crime and NFTs: Chainalysis Detects Significant Wash Trading and Some NFT Money Laundering In this Emerging Asset Class," Chainalysis, Feb. 2, 2022, https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2022-crypto-crime-report-preview-nft-wash-trading-money-laundering/
- Sebastian Sinclair, "Coinbase Takes 50% Share of Circle's Residual USDC Reserve Revenue: Filing," Decrypt, April 1, 2025, https://decrypt.co/312757/coinbase-circles-residual-usdc-reserve-revenue-filing