Key Takeaways:
- Coinbase’s x402 protocol has surpassed 100 million transactions on Base within three quarters.
- Above $1 transfers now represent 95% of the number of payments received (up from the 49% recorded a year ago).
- Indicators of higher agentic payment onsite indicate that on-the-ground value is starting to emerge.
Machine-to-machine payments have long been viewed as a future application for crypto. A new Chainalysis report suggests that the future is starting to take shape on Base through Coinbase’s x402 protocol.
The network has now processed more than 100 million transactions, offering one of the strongest signals yet that AI agents may become active participants in the digital economy.
x402 Reaches a Major Milestone
Developed by Coinbase, x402 allows software agents to make onchain payments automatically when accessing digital resources such as APIs, datasets, or online services.
An AI agent can directly pay with stable coins wherever they need, and immediately gain access to the desired resource, rather than sending an invoice, waiting for the resource provider to approve it, and then logging in to enable access. Chainalysis reports that transactions on Base rose from close to zero in mid-2025 to more than 100 million in the first quarter of 2026.
Many of these gains were tied to the PING memecoin experiment. The users had to pay a fee in x402 before they were allowed to mint tokens and they increased the transaction rate by more than 10,000% within one week.
Speculative trading slowed later but overall, trading continued at a very high level.
Read More: Anchorage Unveils Agentic Banking, Targeting $1T AI-Driven Crypto Finance Boom
Payment Values Are Growing Fast
The report shows that x402 is no longer dominated by tiny test transactions.
Larger Transfers Now Dominate Activity
In early 2025, less than 50% of the moving amount of assets within the protocol (in value) consisted of transfers over $1. By early 2026s, this had risen to 95%.
Meanwhile, trades below $1 waned from 46% to 4% of the volume at the same time. The transition indicates that consumers are more motivated to fund wallets and use them for substantial exchanges, instead of just new technologies.
User Retention Continues to Improve
Chainalysis also observed that engagement is trending upwards.
Over 6 months, the percentage of protocol testers that went to become active payers grew by 4-fold. Despite the lack of significant drivers, weekly wallet retention has also increased on the upward swing.
A report also discovered that x402 users are not ordinary Base users. They’ve newer wallets, substantially more token types in their wallets, and macro is substantially bigger into their wallet.
Agentic Payments seem to have surpassed the proof-of-concept phase, although institutional adoption is just beginning. x402 is now one of the first real-world-scale instances of AI-powered trade running directly on the blockchain and has seen its user interactions grow and progressively increase.
Read More: Circle Unveils Gas-Free USDC Nanopayments Enabling $0.000001 AI Transactions
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