Artificial intelligence agents settling payments have gone from concept to reality over the past 12 months, with $73 million settled across 176 million transactions from May last year to April 2026, according to investment firm Keyrock.
In the report released On Thursday, written in collaboration with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and blockchain Tempo, Keyrock researcher Ben Harvey said that “over the last 12 months, machine-to-machine payments have moved from a concept to a developed ecosystem.”
“Agents have settled over $73 million across 176 million transactions, and incumbents have completed over $8 billion in acquisitions to secure their position in an entirely new payments stack,” Harvey added.
Source: Key rock
AI agents are becoming increasingly popular among cryptocurrency users. Some cryptocurrency executives have speculated that AI agents settling trades could drive adoption and transaction volume, and Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire predicted in January that billions of AI agents would apply stablecoins on behalf of users within five years.
Traditional payment rails are too tardy and exorbitant
According to Harvey, there were more than 104,000 agents registered with at least 15 directories and registries at the end of the first quarter of this year. The average transaction size was approximately 31 cents.
“This number says almost everything about why traditional payment rails can’t serve this market. A flat processing fee of about 30 cents per transaction makes sub-dollar payments uneconomical. An agent paying three cents to call a weather API can’t use Visa,” Harvey said.
“Stablecoins won the settlement layer of machine trading almost by default; they were the only instrument that could support sub-dollar transactions without the economy crashing.”
Related: Exodus launches AI agent-focused stablecoin on Solana
AI agents are also used to create Web3 applications, launch tokens, and interact autonomously with services and protocols, with some platforms using AI for commercial purposes. In April last year, the CoinGecko survey covered 2,632 cryptocurrency users found that most feel comfortable trading AI on their behalf; 87% said they would let AI agents manage at least 10% of their cryptocurrency portfolio.
USDC is the leading settlement option
More than 98% of settlements by AI agents took place on USDC (USDC) Circle, according to Harvey, who said this serves both “verification and vulnerability purposes” because the entire ecosystem depends on a single company, which carries significant risk.
“This means a high dependence on the reserve management, regulatory situation and technical infrastructure of a single stablecoin issuer. If Circle faces a regulatory challenge, a rate-release event, or even a long-term outage, the agent economy will have no choice,” he added.
“This is a systemic risk that no one in the public space is discussing publicly, and we believe it deserves serious attention given the scale of the volumes.”
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