The Honest Number Behind AI Agent Payments: a16z

Payment transaction volumes among artificial intelligence agents are more than 90% lower than reports suggest, but crypto giants are pouring billions into building the infrastructure around it.

AI agents are starting to buy things, but “the numbers are inconsistent,” Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) partner Noah Levine wrote in an X post on Wednesday.

He said a Bloomberg article on Saturday reported that AI agents made $24 million in payments over a 30-day period, citing data from x402.org.

Levine said that data from Allium Labs shows there have been roughly $3 million in AI agent transactions over the same period. Filtering out wash trades shrinks the estimate to around $1.6 million, he added, adding that it is still very early days. 

“The gap tells you how early-stage even the measurement infrastructure is.” 

Levine said that most of the AI payment activity is around developer tools. Firecrawl, a platform that turns websites into AI-ready data, sells web scraping for 1 cent per query, Browserbase, an AI-centric web browser, sells browser sessions, while AI image platform Freepik sells image generation.

“These companies all accept cards, but x402 lets a developer or agent try the tool once without committing to a subscription,” Levine noted. 

x402 is a simple payment standard developed by Coinbase that lets AI agents automatically make payments over the internet.

Agentic payments protocol adoption is growing 

Levine noted that major payment and internet companies such as Stripe, Cloudflare, and Vercel have integrated x402, while Google has embedded the system into its agent payments protocol.

He added that the $1.6 million in volume “is not a big number, but the infrastructure being built around it is.”

“None of them are betting on $1.6 million a month. They are betting on what the number looks like when agents become the default buyer.”

Related: Alchemy introduces autonomous payment rails for AI agents on Base

Levine said that while humans remain involved, interactions occur through agentic platforms like Claude Code and the OpenClaw personal AI assistant, making transactions semi-autonomous.

Coinbase’s x402 Facilitator Launches on Polygon

Meanwhile, Coinbase announced on Thursday that its x402 Facilitator is adding support for the Ethereum layer-2 network Polygon, allowing developers to accept payments of the stablecoin USDC (USDC) on Polygon, Base, and Solana.

“Networks optimized for quick settlement and minimal fees are essential to make these machine-to-machine payments viable,” it stated.

“Very soon, there are going to be more AI agents than humans making transactions,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said on Monday.

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