The payment volumes of AI agents turned out to be lower than previously reported. At the same time, major crypto companies continue to invest billions of dollars in infrastructure for this technology.
Andreessen Horowitz partner Noah Levin said that AI agents have already started making purchases, but the scale of this market remains small for now. He wrote about this on X on Wednesday.
Earlier, Bloomberg reported that over the past 30 days, AI agents made payments totaling about $24 million. The article cited data from the platform x402.org.
However, according to Levin, statistics from Allium Labs show more modest numbers. According to their data, the total transaction volume of AI agents for the same period is about $3 million. If you exclude fake deals, the real amount drops to about $1.6 million.
“This gap shows just how early even the infrastructure for measuring such metrics is,” Levin noted.
Levin noted that most AI agent payments are currently related to developer tools.
For example, the Firecrawl service turns websites into data ready to work with AI and sells website data collection at a price of 1 cent per request. The Browserbase platform, focused on AI, sells browser sessions. The Freepik platform offers image generation using AI.
According to Levin, all these services accept payment by bank card. However, the x402 standard allows a developer or AI agent to try a tool once without subscribing.
x402 is a simple payment standard developed by Coinbase. It allows AI agents to automatically pay for services online.
Such a system could become an important part of the future AI economy, where programs will be able to independently purchase data, tools, and computing resources.
AI agent payments: real figures. Source: a16z Crypto
Use of Payment Protocol for AI Agents Is Growing
Levin noted that major payment and internet companies, including Stripe, Cloudflare, and Vercel, have already integrated x402. In addition, Google has implemented this system into its own payment protocol for AI agents.
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According to him, the transaction volume of $1.6 million cannot yet be called significant. However, the infrastructure now forming around this technology is much more important.
“None of them are betting on $1.6 million a month. They are betting on what this figure will be when agents become default buyers,” he said.
Levin added that people are still involved in the process, but interaction happens through agent platforms such as Claude Code and the personal AI assistant OpenClaw. As a result, many transactions are already becoming semi-autonomous.
Coinbase Expands x402 Support
Meanwhile, Coinbase is expanding support for its x402 Facilitator solution. On Thursday, the company announced that the service has started working with the Polygon layer-two network for Ethereum.
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Now developers can accept payments in the USDC stablecoin worth $1 across multiple networks. These include Polygon, Base, and Solana.
At Coinbase, they say that fast networks and low fees are important for such payments. Without this, the system simply will not work.
“Networks optimized for fast settlement and minimal fees are necessary to make machine-to-machine payments possible,” Coinbase said.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong also previously spoke about the growth of such transactions. In his opinion, in the future, AI agents may start conducting operations more often than people.
“Very soon, there will be more AI agents making transactions than people,” he said.
