- Chainalysis counted more than 138 million x402 transactions on Base in the 12 months to 1 July 2026.
- Over 87% of x402 payments in the 16 months to September were worth between a hundredth of a cent and US$0.10.
- US-linked wallets sent 88.1% of the geolocated payments for AI model inference, Chainalysis found.
More than 138 million payments had gone through the x402 protocol on Coinbase’s Base network by 1 July, according to research Chainalysis published on Wednesday.
The count comes from the North America chapter of the firm’s 2026 Geography of Crypto report. The firm calls Base the most popular blockchain for agentic commerce, where AI agents pay for services on their own. In June, it had counted 100 million x402 transactions on Base.
Coinbase published x402 in May 2025. It lets software pay for an API or web service inside the request for it. There is no checkout page, card form or sign-up, according to Coinbase’s developer documentation. Coinbase Business has used it since July to let merchants accept agent payments in USDC.
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Most Payments Cost Cents
Over 87% of x402 payments were worth between a hundredth of a cent and US$0.10 (AU$0.14), Chainalysis found. That analysis covered the 16 months to September, a longer window because the technology is new. The most common payment was between one and ten cents.
Card networks cannot process payments that small at a profit, Chainalysis said. It said stablecoins that cost less than a cent to settle make them viable.
Wallets using x402 are also being refilled more often. Of wallets first funded in the third quarter of 2025, 70.6% got a second top-up within 30 days. That share rose to 89.3% for wallets first funded in the second quarter of 2026.
New wallets now spend faster too. In late 2025, the median wallet was 73 days old when it made its first x402 payment. That gap had shrunk to 18 minutes by the third quarter of 2026.
Agents Pay for Inference
Early x402 activity came from memecoins such as PING, which drew many new wallets and then faded, Chainalysis said. Lasting x402 demand has come from information services such as code review, financial intelligence, and data and search tools. Agents also pay for model inference, the fee to run an AI model, one of the largest x402 categories.
US-funded agents made 30% of the agent-to-service transactions Chainalysis could locate. Their lead was widest in inference, where US wallets sent 88.1% of geolocated payments.
Chinese-linked wallets took 0.1% of inference payments. Nine in ten payments to security and code analysis services came from those wallets. Almost all of those payments went to AgentLISA, which audits Solidity smart contracts with a language model.
Chainalysis suggested Chinese users may favour free open-weight models such as DeepSeek and Qwen over metered US models.
The firm also argued that single x402 payments are too fast, small and frequent to screen one by one. It said compliance checks should focus on who funds an agent, where it pays and how it behaves.
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