The field of agentic commerce, which describes the use of AI agents to carry out Internet transactions, is rapidly maturing, and crypto is fueling the boom. That’s according to a new report by the blockchain analytics platform Chainalysis, which found developers are increasingly giving AI agents their own budgets to buy the computing power, live web data, and code tools they need to complete tasks.
The growth of agentic commerce over the past 15 months has been steep. On Base, the Coinbase-incubated blockchain, cumulative payments through the x402 protocol—which lets bots automatically pay for online services using crypto—rose from about 1,500 in mid-2025 to more than 138 million by the third quarter of 2026.
In practice, agentic commerce entails providing an AI bot with an allowance: A developer funds the bot’s wallet with stablecoins—typically Circle’s dollar-pegged USDC—and the bot pays for services as it works, without asking a person to approve each purchase. When it needs help with a task, it can pay to get up-to-date information, ask a more capable AI model for help, or use an automated tool to check software code for security flaws.
More than 87% of these payments were for less than 10 cents, per the report. At those amounts, the fee for processing a credit card payment can cost more than the service itself. That makes blockchains an ideal alternative for bots buying services in small amounts, according to Eric Jardine, head of research at Chainalysis.
“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,” Jardine told Fortune.
“The trend is likely to be exponential“
Agentic commerce has proliferated over the past year, and its use cases have spanned from online shopping to travel booking and payments settlement. It has also given AI systems a bigger role in deciding what to buy and how to pay. For consumers and businesses, this means handing AI systems not just tasks, but also spending decisions. Crypto companies have played a key role in spurring their popularity in the United States.
Chief among them is Coinbase, which introduced x402 in May 2025 and later teamed up with cloud security firm Cloudflare to support its development. The protocol’s foundation launched under the Linux Foundation in July with 40 members, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Google, extending its backing beyond the crypto industry.
Chainalysis centered its research on x402 because the protocol was purpose-built for agent-to-agent commerce.
Beyond transaction growth, the report shows that bots are putting funds to work sooner. 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.
Repeat funding has also become more common. Around 90% of qualifying active wallets received another deposit within 30 days, up from roughly 71% a year earlier, suggesting that developers are funding ongoing tasks rather than using them for one-off experiments.
Given agentic commerce’s exponential growth so far, Jardine expects this bot-driven economy to keep expanding as more online platforms accept payments from AI agents.
“I would hazard that the trend is likely to be exponential,” Jardine said. “As activity increases, there’s network effects, and those network effects tend to act like magnets for more activity,” he said.