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Agents buying and selling goods and services using a Coinbase-developed payment protocol grew exponentially over the past week. Illustration: Gwen P; Source: Shutterstock
Crypto use is booming among AI-powered agents.
Agents buying and selling goods and services using a payment protocol developed by Coinbase grew more than 30,000% and 368%, respectively, over the past seven days, according to x402scan.com. The number of transactions grew more than 4,300% to 957,000.
The protocol, x402, has received support from Cloudflare and Google. It allows agents to make payments instantly with near-zero fees using any blockchain.
Agents are the AI-powered bots that could eventually handle everything from online shopping to money management. And the crypto industry has attempted to position blockchain technology as the ideal tool for empowering the so-called “agentic economy.”
Last month, the Ethereum Foundation announced dAI, a team that’s been tasked with boosting Ethereum as a settlement and coordination layer for agents. DAI and Metamask developer Consensys have since published a finalised version of a protocol that allows agents to find, vet, and work with one another without centralised intermediaries.
In May, Coinbase announced x402. The protocol is built atop HTTP, another protocol that undergirds the world wide web.
Agents that attempt to make purchases online often receive the HTTP 402 code, which signals that a payment is required. X402 allows agents to make those payments using cryptocurrency without signing up for accounts or subscriptions.
In September, Google said it would integrate x402 into its own agentic payment protocol, AP2. Later that month, Cloudflare announced NET Dollar, a US dollar-backed stablecoin that would leverage x402.
On Saturday, crypto data provider CoinGecko began tracking crypto assets associated with x402-using agents.
To be sure, even as x402 transactions boom, their value remains relatively miniscule.
While there have been almost one million x402-enabled transactions over the past week, those transactions were worth just $1.1 million. Fewer than 100 transactions were worth more than $100 over the past seven days.
But that’s by design.
“The web as we know it was never designed for small, programmatic payments. Every online service today relies on subscriptions, accounts, and login management,” Gregor Frick, a partner at crypto venture firm Renaud Partners, wrote on X.
X402, on the other hand, “allows you to pay automatically, per request, directly over HTTP: no subscriptions, no logins, no accounts. Think of it as a pay-per-use layer for the internet itself.”
