Visa: AI agent payments are accelerating in development, with x402 processing approximately $15 million in on-chain transaction volume.

Visa has released a joint research report with Artemis titled *Agentic Payments from the Ground Up*, which analyzes the development of AI agent payments and on-chain data. The report divides AI agent payments into two main categories: one is "large commercial payments" where agents complete tasks such as flight bookings and subscription management on behalf of users; the other is small-value machine-to-machine payments, including API calls and compute resource purchases, typically under $1. The machine payment protocol x402—incubated by Coinbase and Cloudflare and later managed by the Linux Foundation—has processed an adjusted trading volume of approximately $15 million and around 109.6 million cumulative transactions since its launch in May 2025, with primary activity concentrated on the Base, Solana, and Polygon networks. Another machine payment protocol, the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), built by Stripe and Tempo with contributions and support from Visa, has completed roughly $25,000 in settlements and processed about 115,000 transactions since its launch in March 2026. Visa noted that the growth of AI agent payments is driving demand for low-cost, high-frequency machine-native payment infrastructure, and stablecoins and blockchain networks are likely to become key components of micro-payment scenarios. The report concludes that future payment systems will not see a single replacement of bank cards or stablecoins, but rather a convergence of both across different use cases.