Artificial intelligence agents have moved from test use to live payments, according to a new Keyrock report written by Ben Harvey in collaboration with Coinbase, Tempo, and Virtuals.
Summary
- AI agents settled $73 million across 176 million transactions, turning stablecoins into a machine-payment rail.
- USDC handled 98.6% of payments, raising reliance concerns as AI commerce starts using crypto rails.
- Coinbase, Google and Solana are building tools that help agents pay for APIs and services.
The report said agents settled more than $73 million across 176 million transactions over 12 months.
Keyrock said machine-to-machine payments are no longer only a concept. The report said four payment models have now emerged, backed by Coinbase, Stripe, Google, Visa, and American Express.
Harvey said “machine-to-machine payments were a concept” a year ago, but the market now has active payment rails. The report also said large financial and technology firms spent more than $8 billion through acquisitions to build their position in the new payment stack.
Stablecoins solve the small-payment problem
Keyrock said the average AI agent payment sits far below normal card-payment economics. Across 176 million x402 payments, the median transaction was between $0.01 and $0.10, while 76% of activity fell below the $0.30 card-fee floor.
That fee gap explains why stablecoins are becoming useful for machine commerce. Keyrock said Layer 2 stablecoin settlement costs about $0.0001, making blockchain rails more workable for small payments such as API calls, data access, and automated digital services.
USDC dominates AI agent settlement
USDC handled 98.6% of the 176 million payments tracked in the Keyrock report. The report said stablecoins became the settlement layer for machine commerce because they could process sub-dollar payments without breaking the business model.
Keyrock also flagged concentration risk. It said the agent-payment market depends heavily on Circle’s reserve management, regulatory position, and technical infrastructure. The report described this as both a validation of USDC and a weakness for the wider sector.
Coinbase and Google expand agent payment tools
Related reports show that Coinbase has been building AI agent payments through x402 and Agentic.market. Crypto.news reported that Agentic.market lets autonomous agents find and buy services using USDC, while x402 had already settled about 165 million transactions across more than 480,000 agents at launch.
Market updates also show the race is wider than Coinbase. Crypto.news reported that Google and Solana launched Pay.sh for stablecoin-based API payments, while Anchorage Digital introduced AI banking tools for autonomous payments. These moves show that AI agent payments are becoming a live infrastructure market, not only a crypto experiment.
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