AI Agents Settle $73 Million in Stablecoin Payments

Artificial intelligence agents have settled more than $73 million across 176 million transactions over the past year, signaling the emergence of a payment layer built on stablecoins and blockchain rails, according to a report from crypto investment firm Keyrock produced in collaboration with Coinbase and the blockchain network Tempo. The study, covering activity from May 2025 through April 2026, documented more than 104,000 registered AI agents across at least 15 directories by the end of the first quarter of this year, with an average transaction size of roughly 31 cents.

The subdollar nature of these payments exposes the limitations of traditional card networks, which typically charge a fixed processing fee of around 30 cents per transaction. Keyrock researcher Ben Harvey said that 76 percent of agent payments fell below that threshold, making conventional rails economically unviable for machine-to-machine commerce. “An agent paying three cents for a weather API call can't route through Visa,” Harvey said in the report. Layer 2 stablecoin settlement costs roughly 0.01 cents, enabling transactions as small as a fraction of a cent.

Nearly all settlements, 98.6 percent, were...