Keyrock, a crypto trading and investment firm, said AI agents settled more than US$73 million across about 176 million blockchain transactions from May 2025 to April 2026.

That remains tiny next to the stablecoin volume that Visa said reached US$51 trillion over the past 12 months.

The firm said Coinbase’s x402 protocol, Stripe and Tempo’s Machine Payments Protocol, Google’s AP2, and Visa’s agentic commerce stack show tech, payments, and crypto companies are building systems that let software buy data, cloud services, and application programming interface access autonomously.

Keyrock said 76% of AI agent transactions fall below the US$0.30 fixed-fee floor common in card payments. Most transactions were worth one to 10 cents, while a USDC transfer on Base cost about US$0.0001.

It added that 98.6% of machine payments settled in USDC, pointing to concentration risk. Keyrock also said bots and automated contracts accounted for more than half of gas use on Base and Optimism.

Keyrock said Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) in Europe, the US GENIUS Act, and the European Union’s AI Act do not directly address autonomous machine-to-machine payments, leaving questions about identity, authorization, and liability unresolved.

🔗 Source: CoinDesk

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