AI Agents Have Made 138 Million Payments Over x402, Most of Them Under 10 Cents

AI agents have made more than 138 million payments through Coinbase's x402 protocol on Base, and the large majority of them were worth less than a dime, according to the North America chapter of Chainalysis' 2026 Geography of Cryptocurrency Report, published on Wednesday.

x402, which Coinbase introduced in 2025, revives the long-unused HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code so that a website or API can ask for a stablecoin payment before serving a request. That lets software agents pay for a model call, a dataset or another agent's service without a human entering card details or holding an account with the provider.

Chainalysis found that more than 87% of x402 payments fell between US$0.0001 and US$0.10, with one to ten cents the most common size. AI model inference was among the largest spending categories, followed by information services such as code review, financial intelligence and data and search APIs, as well as agent frameworks and tooling. Memecoin activity drove some early volume but faded. Chainalysis did not disclose the total dollar value of x402 payments.

The geographic split is notable. U.S.-linked wallets accounted for 88.1% of geolocated payments for AI model inference, while Chinese-linked wallets made about 90% of payments in the security and code analysis category, nearly all of it to a single smart contract auditing service, and only 0.1% of model inference payments. Chainalysis suggested one explanation is that Chinese-developed open-weight models are free to run, whereas leading U.S. models are metered per call.

Usage also appears to be becoming more automated. The median age of a wallet at its first x402 payment fell from 73 days in late 2025 to 18 minutes by the third quarter of 2026, and the share of wallets that spent within an hour of being funded rose from 4% to 67% over the same period. Both figures are consistent with agents being spun up with a funded wallet and put to work immediately.

The chapter also contains data relevant to Asia. Singapore accounted for 18.2% of the value of geolocated tokenized U.S. Treasuries, ahead of the U.S. at 10.5% but behind Italy at 29.9% and Portugal at 18.8%. Tokenized Treasuries were worth $15.42 billion at the end of June, the largest slice of a $36.07 billion tokenized real-world asset market. Chainalysis noted that its figures cover public blockchains only and exclude permissioned platforms.

Dollar stablecoins accounted for 99.1% of stablecoin order book volume globally, with euro-pegged tokens at 0.45% despite the EU's MiCA framework, a figure that bears on plans for local-currency stablecoins in Singapore and Hong Kong. Remittance-sized stablecoin and bitcoin transfers from Canada to India, China and the Philippines rose 141% year over year to $2.36 billion across 3.56 million transactions.

The North American crypto economy as a whole was flat. The U.S. and Canada received $3.02 trillion in on-chain value in the 12 months to July 1, down 1.9% from the prior period, a backdrop against which the growth in agent payments and tokenized assets stands out.