Artificial intelligence agents settling payments have gone from concept to reality in the last 12 months, with $73 million settled across 176 million transactions from May last year through April 2026, according to crypto investment firm Keyrock.
In a report released Thursday, written in collaboration with crypto exchange Coinbase and the blockchain Tempo, Keyrock researcher Ben Harvey said that “in the past 12 months, machine-to-machine payments have gone from concept to a developed ecosystem.”
“Agents have settled over $73 million across 176 million transactions, and incumbents have deployed more than $8 billion in acquisitions to secure their position in what is emerging as an entirely new payment stack,” Harvey added.
Source: Keyrock
AI agents are becoming increasingly popular among crypto users. Some crypto executives have speculated that AI agents settling transactions could drive adoption and transaction volumes, with Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire predicting in January that billions of AI agents will operate with stablecoins on users’ behalf within five years.
Traditional payment rails too slow and expensive
By the end of the first quarter this year, there were more than 104,000 agents registered across 15 or more directories and registries, according to Harvey. The average transaction size was about 31 cents.
“That number tells you almost everything about why traditional payment rails can’t serve this market. A fixed processing fee of roughly 30 cents per transaction makes sub-dollar payments uneconomical. An agent paying three cents for a weather API call can’t route through Visa,” Harvey said.
“Stablecoins won the settlement layer for machine commerce almost by default; they were the only instrument that could handle sub-dollar transactions without the economics collapsing.”
AI agents are also used to build Web3 applications, launch tokens and interact with services and protocols autonomously, with some platforms exploring AI for trading. Last April, a CoinGecko survey of 2,632 crypto users found that most are comfortable with AI trading on their behalf; 87% said they would let AI agents manage at least 10% of their crypto portfolio.
$USDC the leading settlement option
More than 98% of settlements by AI agents were in Circle’s $USDC ($USDC), according to Harvey, who said this serves as both a “validation and a vulnerability” because the entire ecosystem depends on one company, carrying significant risks.
“This is a lot of dependence on a single stablecoin issuer’s reserve management, regulatory standing, and technical infrastructure. If Circle faces a regulatory challenge, a de-peg event, or even sustained downtime, the agent economy has no fallback,” he added.
“This is a systemic risk that nobody in the space is publicly discussing, and one we believe warrants serious attention as volumes scale.”