In brief

• Autonomous AI agents have made over 138 million crypto payments through Coinbase’s x402 protocol on Base, per Chainalysis, as “agentic commerce” emerges as one of crypto’s fastest-growing use cases.
• The payments are tiny—87%+ fell between a hundredth of a cent and 10 cents—the kind of micro-transactions stablecoins handle but card rails can’t.
• The boom rides maturing infrastructure from Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase and Google, though earlier research suggests much agent activity may be scripts, not genuine agents.