The next batch of crypto users might not even be human.
AI agents have already started paying for things themselves with USDC.
Coinbase’s x402 protocol has processed more than 169 million payments over the past year, covering 590k+ buyers and 100k+ sellers.
Coinbase’s head of AI products estimates that, of the observable x402 payments, about 99% use USDC.
What exactly are they buying?
Not shoes, and not hotel bookings.
The most common scenario now is that, to complete tasks, AI spends a few cents to buy API access, data, compute, and model calls.
The process is simple:
AI requests a service → the website returns “payment required” → the AI automatically pays USDC → the service is opened immediately.
No account registration is needed, no credit card entry is required, and there’s no need for the owner to click to confirm each time.
This line has been accelerating recently.
AWS’s Bedrock AgentCore Payments has officially been integrated with Coinbase x402; Cloudflare has also launched Wallets, letting users assign a dedicated wallet, budget, and per-transaction spending limit to an AI.
In the past, the biggest use case for stablecoins was trading and transfers. Now there’s another category of new user: software—potentially paying 24/7.
The imagination space here is huge.
A person might only make a few payments in a day, while one AI agent may continuously pay dozens of data sources, models, and APIs at the same time to complete a single task.
But the scale is still very early. And Coinbase itself also admits that some of the transactions may come from testing and leaderboard “volume boosting.”
What’s truly worth tracking is whether, after AI payments move from “buying APIs for a few dimes” to real commercial scale, USDC and public blockchains will become the default settlement layer for machine economies.#AI
AI agents have already started paying for things themselves with USDC.
Coinbase’s x402 protocol has processed more than 169 million payments over the past year, covering 590k+ buyers and 100k+ sellers.
Coinbase’s head of AI products estimates that, of the observable x402 payments, about 99% use USDC.
What exactly are they buying?
Not shoes, and not hotel bookings.
The most common scenario now is that, to complete tasks, AI spends a few cents to buy API access, data, compute, and model calls.
The process is simple:
AI requests a service → the website returns “payment required” → the AI automatically pays USDC → the service is opened immediately.
No account registration is needed, no credit card entry is required, and there’s no need for the owner to click to confirm each time.
This line has been accelerating recently.
AWS’s Bedrock AgentCore Payments has officially been integrated with Coinbase x402; Cloudflare has also launched Wallets, letting users assign a dedicated wallet, budget, and per-transaction spending limit to an AI.
In the past, the biggest use case for stablecoins was trading and transfers. Now there’s another category of new user: software—potentially paying 24/7.
The imagination space here is huge.
A person might only make a few payments in a day, while one AI agent may continuously pay dozens of data sources, models, and APIs at the same time to complete a single task.
But the scale is still very early. And Coinbase itself also admits that some of the transactions may come from testing and leaderboard “volume boosting.”
What’s truly worth tracking is whether, after AI payments move from “buying APIs for a few dimes” to real commercial scale, USDC and public blockchains will become the default settlement layer for machine economies.#AI