A new report from Keyrock says artificial intelligence agents are no longer being tested only in experiments and are now actively making real digital payments using crypto infrastructure.
The report, written by Ben Harvey in collaboration with Coinbase, Tempo, and Virtuals, revealed that AI agents processed more than $73 million across 176 million transactions over the past year.
According to the report, machine-to-machine payments are becoming a real part of the digital economy, with major companies such as Coinbase, Google, Visa, American Express, and Stripe helping develop the infrastructure behind them.
The study explained that stablecoins are solving one of the biggest problems in AI-powered commerce: handling extremely small payments efficiently.
Most AI agent transactions reportedly ranged between one cent and ten cents, while around 76% of all activity was below the normal minimum fee charged by traditional card payment systems.
Because standard payment networks become too expensive for tiny transactions, stablecoins running on blockchain networks are becoming a practical solution. The report said Layer-2 blockchain payments can cost as little as $0.0001 per transaction.
These low fees make stablecoins useful for automated payments such as API access, digital services, cloud computing, and machine-to-machine transactions.
The report showed that USD Coin dominated the sector, handling around 98.6% of all AI agent payments tracked in the study.
However, Keyrock also warned that this creates concentration risks because the growing AI payment market depends heavily on the infrastructure and reserve management of Circle, the company behind USDC.
Meanwhile, Coinbase has been expanding its own AI payment systems through projects like Agentic.market and x402, which allow autonomous AI agents to discover and purchase services using stablecoins.
Other companies are also moving into the space. Google and Solana recently launched Pay.sh for stablecoin-based API payments, while Anchorage Digital introduced AI-focused banking tools for automated financial activity.
The report concluded that AI-powered payments are quickly evolving from a crypto experiment into a growing part of global financial infrastructure.
