Crypto rails are becoming the default payment layer for AI agents, report says
Key takeaways
- The crypto trading and investment firm estimated that AI agents settled over $73 million across roughly 176 million transactions on blockchain rails between May 2025 and April 2026.
- The volumes remain negligible compared to traditional finance (TradFi).
- The broader idea behind agentic payments is that software increasingly consumes digital services autonomously rather than through human-managed subscriptions and accounts.
A new report from Keyrock says stablecoins on blockchain rails are becoming the go-to payment layer for AI agents as traditional card rails struggle to handle micropayments.By Krisztian Sandor|Edited by Jamie Crawley May 24, 2026, 1:00 p.m. 2 min read Make preferred on Robots (Unsplash/Sumaid pal Singh Bakshi/Modified by Coin Desk)What to know: AI agents settled more than $73 million across 176 million blockchain transactions over the past year, according to Keyrock, though that remains a tiny fraction of the global payments market.Coinbase, Stripe, Google and Visa are building competing infrastructure for machine-to-machine payments as software agents increasingly buy data, computing power and digital services autonomously.Nearly all agent payments currently settle in USDC, highlighting both Circle’s growing importance in crypto payments and the risks of relying heavily on a single stablecoin issuer.Artificial intelligence (AI) agents autonomously spending money online is still a tiny market, but some of the world's largest tech, payments and crypto firms are already racing to build the infrastructure for it, Keyrock said in a new report.
The crypto trading and investment firm estimated that AI agents settled over $73 million across roughly 176 million transactions on blockchain rails between May 2025 and April 2026.
The volumes remain negligible compared to traditional finance (TradFi). Visa, for example, alone processes $14.5 trillion annually. But the significance lies less in the headline U.S. dollar value and more in how quickly the infrastructure stack is forming, the report argued. Global firms such as Coinbase (COIN), Stripe, Google (GOOG) and Visa (V) all rolled out competing systems for machine-to-machine payments.