Artificial intelligence (AI) agents that autonomously spend money online remains a small market, but some of the world’s largest technology, payments and crypto companies are already racing to build the infrastructure for it, Keyrock said in a new report.
The cryptocurrency trading and investment firm estimated that AI agents settled more than $73 million in approximately 176 million transactions on blockchain rails between May 2025 and April 2026.
Volumes remain negligible compared to traditional finance (TradFi). Visa alone, for example, processes $14.5 billion a year. But the importance lies less in the value of the US dollar and more in how quickly the infrastructure is taking shape, the report argues. Global companies such as Coinbase (COIN), Stripe, Google (GOOG), and Visa (V) have implemented competitive systems for machine-to-machine payments.
The broader idea behind agent payments is that software increasingly consumes digital services autonomously rather than through subscriptions and human-managed accounts. An AI trading agent, for example, could continually purchase AI-generated market data, cloud computing, or analytics in small increments throughout the day without a human manually authorizing each payment.
That potential is driving ambitious forecasts about how big the agent payments sector could grow. Gartner projects that AI agents could broker $15 trillion in purchases by 2028, while McKinsey estimated agent retail could reach $3 trillion to $5 trillion by 2030, according to the Keyrock report.
Those projections imply even faster growth rates than stablecoins experienced during their breakout years, according to the report, but it says the pace of infrastructure deployment already indicates the market is moving beyond its experimentation phase.
Coinbase’s x402 protocol has become one of the leading native crypto systems. The protocol allows AI agents to pay directly with USDC for services such as blockchain analysis or cloud infrastructure without creating accounts or subscriptions.
Stripe, with its Tempo blockchain, launched a competitive framework called Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), while Google introduced AP2, a system focused on delegated spending authorization for AI agents. Visa has expanded its network of cards with tokenized credentials designed for AI-powered commerce.
Cryptocurrencies and stablecoins are emerging as the preferred settlement layer, and economics helps explain why.
According to the report, about 76% of agent transactions fall below the 30-cent flat-fee minimum common in card payments. Most payments ranged between one and 10 cents, making traditional rails impractical for automated software agents purchasing data, AI inferences, or API access. Meanwhile, settling stablecoins on some blockchains like Base and Tempo costs fractions of a cent.
Currently, 98.6% of automatic payments are settled in USDC, the stablecoin issued by Circle (CRCL). That solidifies Circle’s position in crypto payments, but also introduces concentration risk, creating dependence on a single issuer.
Regulation could be a source of limitation to growth. MiCA in Europe, the US GENIUS Act, and the EU AI Act are expected to come into effect in mid-2026, but none of them directly address autonomous machine-to-machine transactions or issues around agent liability and identity, the report notes.
