Artificial intelligence (AI) agents’ growing use of cryptocurrency to purchase digital services is pointing toward a practical market for automated payments: transactions so small and frequent that conventional card processing becomes uneconomic. But the scale of genuinely autonomous commerce remains harder to establish than headline payment counts suggest.
A Chainalysis study found more than 138 million transactions through x402 on Base, Coinbase’s layer-2 blockchain network. As described by Decrypt, the activity reflects developers giving agents budgets to acquire computing power, live web data and coding tools automatically, making payments part of how the agents complete assignments.
The size of those purchases explains the…
