AI agents have processed more than 138 million crypto payments through Coinbase's x402 protocol on the Base blockchain, paying autonomously for data, computing power and access to AI models, according to Chainalysis research released Wednesday.

The report, "Inside North America's $3 trillion crypto economy: Agentic commerce accelerates," puts the United States firmly at the center of this emerging market. U.S.-linked wallets accounted for 88.1% of geographically identified payments for AI model inference. Chinese-linked wallets held just 0.1% of that segment.

"One possible explanation is that Chinese developers are more inclined to use open-weight models such as DeepSeek and Qwen, reducing their need to purchase metered inference services," Eric Jardine, Chainalysis' head of research, told CoinDesk.

He stopped short of calling it a structural shift. "That's one possible interpretation, but we wouldn't go so far as to say open-source AI is starving Asia's on-chain inference market," Jardine said.

How big are the payments?

Mostly tiny. More than 87% of x402 payments analyzed by Chainalysis were worth between one-hundredth of a cent and 10 cents — sums too small to clear profitably on traditional card networks. That's the operational case for stablecoins here: unlike card rails, they can settle fractions of a cent without human sign-off, letting agents buy services on their own.

Aggregate value remains modest relative to transaction counts. In July, x402 processed roughly 75 million payments worth just $24 million over 30 days. Earlier research also flagged signs of artificial activity on the network, and Chainalysis itself notes that transaction volume alone doesn't establish genuine commercial demand.

Is agent behavior changing?

The retention data suggests it is. Among wallets first funded in the second quarter of 2026, 89.3% received additional funding within 30 days, up from 70.6% for wallets first funded in Q3 2025. The analysis excluded wallets active on only a single day.

Time-to-first-payment has collapsed. The gap between a wallet receiving funds and making its first x402 payment fell from an average of 73 days in late 2025 to 18 minutes in Q3 2026 — a signal that deployment pipelines, not manual experimentation, now drive activity.

China shows a distinct pattern. Chinese-linked wallets made up roughly 90% of geographically identified payments for security and code-analysis services, most of it flowing to AgentLisa, an AI-powered smart contract auditing platform.

Who is backing the rails?

The findings land as the payments establishment moves into the space. Visa, Mastercard and Stripe are among the giants that have backed the x402 protocol, and Coinbase now lets business customers accept payments directly from AI agents.

Industry executives see agents as the next demand shock for stablecoin rails. Yat Siu, co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands, told CoinDesk he estimates up to 100 billion AI agents will transact on the internet over the next few years — and they will be using crypto. Stephanie Cohen, Cloudflare's chief strategy officer, framed the near-term use case narrowly: "Stablecoins are particularly well suited to the kinds of transactions we expect AI agents to make at first."

Chainalysis frames the shift in user-accounting terms. "AI agents are becoming economic actors where every agent is effectively a new 'user' of the blockchain," the report's contributor Tejwani said.

The figures cover identifiable x402 transactions only, not the full global market for AI payments. What they show is a market with real traction in count and retention but still sub-scale in value — and one where U.S. wallets are setting the early spending habits for autonomous software. The test ahead is whether per-transaction values grow past the 10-cent band, which would indicate agents buying compute and inference at commercially meaningful scale rather than proving out micropayment plumbing.