Autonomous AI agents made over 138 million crypto payments through Coinbase’s x402 protocol on Base between mid-2025 and the third quarter of 2026. More than 87% of these payments were micro-transactions ranging from a hundredth of a cent to 10 cents, amounts stablecoins can handle but traditional card rails cannot. US-linked wallets accounted for 88.1% of geographically identifiable payments for AI model inference, compared with just 0.1% for China. Infrastructure for agent payments is maturing rapidly, with Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase and Google all developing dedicated protocols. Earlier research suggests that a significant portion of apparent agent activity may come from automated scripts rather than genuine autonomous agents.
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