Chainalysis: 138M Base x402 bot payments, 87% under 10 cents

Cumulative transactions through x402 on Base, the Coinbase-incubated blockchain, rose from about 1,500 in mid-2025 to more than 138 million by the third quarter of 2026, according to a Chainalysis report covered by Fortune. More than 87% of those payments were for less than 10 cents.

The protocol lets bots automatically pay for online services using crypto. A developer funds the bot's wallet with stablecoins, typically Circle's dollar-pegged USDC, and the agent spends from there. Coinbase introduced x402 in May 2025 and later teamed up with cloud security firm Cloudflare to support its development. In July, the protocol's foundation launched under the Linux Foundation with 40 members, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and Google.

The behavioral data moves faster than the volume. The median time between a wallet receiving its first deposit and making its first payment fell from 73 days in late 2025 to 18 minutes by the third quarter of 2026. Roughly two-thirds of new wallets now spend within an hour of receiving funds, and around 90% of qualifying active wallets received another deposit within 30 days, up from roughly 71% a year earlier.

"You have this perfect combination of speed plus low cost to settle, and that's the sort of thing that you would need if you were doing true AI-to-AI commerce," Eric Jardine, head of research at Chainalysis, told Fortune. He expects the curve to keep bending: "I would hazard that the trend is likely to be exponential," citing network effects that "tend to act like magnets for more activity."

What the agents actually buy is sketched loosely. Fortune's write-up spans use cases from "online shopping to travel booking and payments settlement," and the report does not separate genuine commerce from developer testing or human-triggered scripts. Agents have been the busiest beat on our radar lately, with 479 stories tracked in the last 90 days.