Payment transaction volumes between artificial intelligence agents appear to be far lower than some reports suggest, though major crypto companies are still investing heavily in the infrastructure supporting the technology.
According to Noah Levine, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, AI agents have begun making purchases, but the available data on their activity remains inconsistent. Writing in a post on X on Wednesday, Levine noted that reliable transaction figures are still difficult to determine.
A report by Bloomberg on Saturday claimed that AI agents processed about $24 million in payments over a 30-day period, citing information from x402.org.
However, Levine said data from Allium Labs indicates the actual volume is significantly lower. According to that dataset, AI agent transactions totaled roughly $3 million during the same timeframe. After filtering out suspected wash trading, the figure falls to about $1.6 million, suggesting that the sector remains in its early stages of development.
“The gap tells you how early-stage even the measurement infrastructure is.”
Noah Levine, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said most current AI-driven payment activity is centered around developer-focused tools. For example, Firecrawl — a platform that converts websites into AI-ready datasets — charges about one cent per query for web scraping. Meanwhile, Browserbase sells browser sessions designed for AI use, and the AI image platform Freepik offers paid image generation services.
Levine explained that while these platforms typically accept credit card payments, the payment standard developed by Coinbase allows developers or AI agents to test services without committing to a full subscription.
The system, known as x402 payment standard, enables AI agents to automatically complete payments over the internet, making it easier for software agents to access and pay for digital services on demand.
Noah Levine noted that adoption of agent-based payment systems is gradually expanding. Major technology and payments companies such as Stripe, Cloudflare and Vercel have already integrated the x402 payment standard, while Google has incorporated the system into its own agent payment protocol.
Although the current transaction volume — estimated at around $1.6 million — remains relatively small, Levine emphasized that the broader ecosystem being built around agentic payments is expanding rapidly. “It’s not a big number,” he said, “but the infrastructure being built around it is.”
“None of them are betting on $1.6 million a month. They are betting on what the number looks like when agents become the default buyer.”
Noah Levine said that although humans are still involved in many interactions, transactions increasingly take place through agent-based platforms such as Claude Code and the OpenClaw personal AI assistant. These tools allow payments to occur in a semi-autonomous way through AI agents.
x402 facilitator expands to Polygon
Meanwhile, Coinbase announced on Thursday that its x402 Facilitator will now support the Polygon network. The update enables developers to accept payments in the stablecoin USDC across multiple networks, including Polygon, Base and Solana.
The company noted that blockchain networks optimized for fast settlement and low transaction fees are crucial for enabling machine-to-machine payments between AI agents.
Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, also highlighted the potential scale of this trend, saying on Monday that in the near future AI agents could outnumber humans in the number of transactions they execute.
