AI agents make 138 million crypto payments as U.S. dominates spending on AI models

Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are no longer just talking to each other. They are paying for services, buying data and even purchasing access to tokens the AI models, with more than 138 million transactions recorded through the x402 protocol on Coinbase’s Base blockchain, according to a Chainalysis’ Inside North America's $3 trillion crypto economy: Agentic commerce accelerates report.

The United States dominates this emerging market. U.S.linked wallets accounted for 88.1% of the geographically identified payments for AI model inference, compared with just 0.1% for Chinese-linked wallets, the blockchain analytics firm found.

"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," Eric Jardine, Chainalysis' head of research, told CoinDesk.

The findings, released Wednesday, come as Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and other payments giants have backed the x402 protocol, while Coinbase has begun allowing business customers to accept payments from AI agents.

Yat Siu, co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands, recently told CoinDesk that over the next few years he estimates up to 100 billion AI agents will be transacting on the internet and they will be using crypto. And crypto’s next billion users might be AI agents paying with stablecoins. “Stablecoins are particularly well suited to the kinds of transactions we expect AI agents to make at first,” Stephanie Cohen, Cloudflare’s chief strategy officer, told CoinDesk.

Unlike traditional card payments, stablecoins can handle transactions worth fractions of a cent, allowing AI agents to buy data, computing power and other services without human intervention. The new Chainalysis figures offer evidence of growing use of those payment systems, although transaction counts alone do not establish how much represents genuine commercial demand.

Much of the activity runs through x402, a payments protocol incubated by Coinbase that allows AI agents to pay automatically for digital services using crypto.

More than 87% of x402 payments analyzed by Chainalysis were worth between one-hundredth of a cent and 10 cents, making them too small to process economically through traditional credit card networks.

The amounts remain small. In July, x402 processed roughly 75 million payments worth just $24 million over 30 days. Earlier research also raised questions about artificial activity on the network.