Karla Barker 
Artificial intelligence agents spending money autonomously online is still a small market. But some of the world’s biggest tech, payments, and crypto firms are already building the infrastructure for it. That’s according to a new report from Keyrock, a crypto trading and investment firm.
The report estimates that between May 2025 and April 2026, AI agents settled over $73 million across roughly 176 million transactions on blockchain networks. Those numbers are tiny compared to traditional finance. Visa alone processes about $14.5 trillion annually. Still, the report argues the real story isn’t the dollar value. It is how fast the infrastructure stack is forming.
Major players are moving in
Global companies like Coinbase, Stripe, Google, and Visa have all launched competing systems for machine-to-machine payments. The idea behind “agentic payments” is simple. Software increasingly consumes digital services on its own, instead of relying on human-managed subscriptions or accounts. For example, an AI trading agent could buy market data, cloud computing power, or AI-generated analysis in tiny increments throughout the day. It wouldn’t need a person to approve each payment.
That potential is leading to some ambitious forecasts. Gartner thinks AI agents could intermediate $15 trillion in purchases by 2028. McKinsey estimates retail agentic commerce could hit $3 trillion to $5 trillion by 2030. Those growth rates would be even faster than stablecoins saw during their breakout years, the report says. And the pace of infrastructure deployment suggests the market is moving beyond just experimenting.
Different approaches from different companies
Coinbase’s x402 protocol has become one of the leading crypto-native systems. It lets AI agents pay directly with USDC for services like blockchain analytics or cloud infrastructure. No accounts or subscriptions needed. Stripe, through its Tempo blockchain, launched a competing framework called Machine Payments Protocol (MPP). Google introduced AP2, which focuses on delegated spending authorization for AI agents. Visa extended its card network with tokenized credentials designed for AI-driven commerce.
Crypto rails and stablecoins are emerging as the preferred way to settle these payments. The economics explain why. About 76% of agent transactions fall below the 30 cent fixed-fee floor common in card payments. Most payments range between one and ten cents. Traditional payment rails just don’t work for automated software agents buying data, AI inference, or API access. Meanwhile, stablecoin settlement on blockchains like Base and Tempo costs fractions of a cent.
Concentration and regulation risks
Right now, 98.6% of machine payments settle in USDC, the stablecoin issued by Circle. That solidifies Circle’s position. But it also creates a concentration risk. The whole system depends on a single issuer, which might be fragile.
Regulation could also slow things down. Europe’s MiCA, the U.S. GENIUS Act, and the EU AI Act are all expected to take effect around mid-2026. But none of them directly address autonomous machine-to-machine transactions. Questions about liability and agent identity remain unanswered. That might create uncertainty for companies building in this space.