Chainalysis Reports AI Agents Made Over 138M Crypto Payments via Coinbase x402

AI agents recorded more than 138M transactions through the Coinbase-incubated x402 payments protocol on the Base blockchain to buy data and access to AI models, according to a Chainalysis report released Wednesday. More than 87% of analyzed x402 payments were worth between $0.0001 and $0.10, while July activity totaled roughly 75M payments worth $24M over 30 days alongside earlier research questioning artificial activity on the network. US-linked wallets accounted for 88.1% of geographically identified payments for AI model inference compared with 0.1% for Chinese-linked wallets, while Chinese-linked wallets accounted for roughly 90% of identified payments for security and code-analysis services, largely directed toward smart contract auditing platform AgentLisa. Among wallets first funded in Q2 2026 (excluding single-day payment wallets), 89.3% received additional funding within 30 days—up from 70.6% in Q3 2025—while the average time between initial funding and a first x402 payment dropped from 73 days in late 2025 to 18 minutes in Q3 2026. "One possible explanation is that Chinese developers are more inclined to use open-weight models such as DeepSeek and Qwen, reducing their need to purchase metered inference services." — Eric Jardine, Head of Research at Chainalysis.