Payment transaction volume among AI agents is more than 90% lower than reports suggest, but crypto giants are investing billions to build infrastructure around them.
AI agents are starting to buy things, but “the numbers are inconsistent,” Andreessen Horowitz partner (a16z) Noah Levine he wrote in post X on Wednesday.
Bloomberg said article on Saturday reported that AI agents made $24 million in payments within 30 days, citing data from x402.org.
Levine said Allium Labs data shows AI agent transactions totaled about $3 million during the same period. Filtering out wash transactions narrows the estimate to about $1.6 million, he said, adding that it’s still very early.
“The gap shows how early even the measurement infrastructure is.”
Levine said most of the AI payments activity involves software tools. Firecrawl, a platform that turns web pages into AI-ready data, sells web scraping for 1 cent per query, Browserbase, an AI-focused web browser, sells browser sessions, and AI image platform Freepik sells image generation.
“All of these companies accept cards, but x402 allows a developer or agent to try the tool once without having to purchase a subscription,” Levine noted.
x402 is a straightforward payment standard developed by Coinbase that allows AI agents to automatically make payments over the Internet.
The popularity of the agent payment protocol is growing
Levine noted that major payment and internet companies such as Stripe, Cloudflare and Vercel have integrated x402, while Google has built the system into its agent payments protocol.
He added that the $1.6 million figure “isn’t a big number, but the infrastructure being built around it is.”
“None of them are betting $1.6 million a month. They’re betting on what the number will look like when agents become the default buyer.”
Related: Alchemy introduces autonomous payment rails for AI agents in Base
Levine said that while humans remain engaged, interactions occur through agent platforms such as Claude Code and the OpenClaw personal AI assistant, making transactions semi-autonomous.
The x402 Coinbase facilitator launches on the Polygon platform
Meanwhile, Coinbase announced on Thursday, its Facilitator x402 adds support for Polygon’s layer 2 Ethereum network, allowing developers to accept USDC (USDC) stablecoin payments on Polygon, Base and Solana platforms.
“Networks optimized for fast settlements and minimal fees are essential to making machine-to-machine payments profitable,” he said.
“There will soon be more AI agents than humans making transactions,” says Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong he said on Monday.
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