An estimated $390 billion in stablecoin payments took place in 2025, according to McKinsey and Artemis. But inside this market, AI agents are creating an interesting kind of payment activity.
Research shows that agents completed more than 176 million on-chain transactions worth over $73 million between May 2025 and April 2026. But most of them were very small transactions.
The median x402 payment was between $0.01 and $0.10, while 76% of transactions fell below the $0.30 fixed-fee threshold for card payments. USDC accounted for 98.6% of settlements.
Although the transaction amounts are small, the frequency of AI agentic payments is staggering — 173 million.
Software can buy data, compute and other services hundreds or thousands of times without the human behaviors that define conventional commerce. For example, opening an account, entering card details, approving an invoice or waiting until the next banking day.
XDC Network believes this offers an early glimpse of how more payments could work in future.
“Money has always moved as fast as the slowest part of the process, like a bank, a clearinghouse, or normal business hours,” Atul Khekade, Co-Founder of XDC Network, told BeInCrypto. “Agents just show what happens when you get rid of those delays. Payments stop being something you wait around for and turn into a continuous process happening in the background at the speed of the underlying network.”
Machine Payments
Software can transact continuously. An AI service may need a weather feed for one calculation, a market-price API several seconds later, and compute resources immediately afterward.
Each interaction can carry its own price, turning what might once have been a monthly subscription or invoice into thousands of individual transactions.
That helps explain why Keyrock found activity spread across such a large population of AI agents and service directories. The report found more than 104,000 agents registered across at least 15 directories by the end of the first quarter of 2026.
The economics favor systems that can handle payments measured in cents or fractions of a cent. The payments industry is already preparing:
- Stripe launched the Machine Payments Protocol, or MPP, in March. The open standard allows agents and services to coordinate micropayments and recurring payments programmatically, with Stripe supporting stablecoins as well as traditional payment methods;
- Google’s Agent Payments Protocol, or AP2, concentrates on proving user authorization and establishing an auditable record of what an agent was permitted to buy. Google transferred the protocol to the FIDO Alliance in April and added support for autonomous “Human Not Present” transactions;
- Cloudflare entered the market in August with Cloudflare Wallets and cloudflare.pay, giving agents identities and programmable spending controls. Its payment tools support both x402 and MPP;
- Mastercard’s Agent Pay for Machines service, announced in June, is designed for continuous, high-frequency and low-value payments, with settlement across cards, accounts and stablecoins. More than 30 companies, including Stripe, Coinbase, Cloudflare and Tempo, were named among its initial supporters.
Invisible Settlement
XDC’s contribution to this market is XDCAI.tech, which uses the open x402 protocol originally introduced by Coinbase.
x402 turns the HTTP ‘402 Payment Required’ response into a payment mechanism. An agent requests a resource, receives its price, authorizes the payment, and repeats the request with proof of payment. The process allows software to purchase an API call or another digital service within the same interaction.
Coinbase introduced the protocol in May 2025, and its use has since expanded through integrations with companies including AWS.
XDC AI applies x402 to USDC settlement on XDC Network. Users fund a smart wallet with USDC and establish an on-chain spending limit. An agent can then pay an x402-enabled service per request. EIP-3009 allows the payment to be signed off-chain while a relayer covers the network fee, leaving the agent itself to hold and spend USDC.
The system can also connect to AI applications through MCP or a command-line interface, allowing agents running through products including ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and Codex to discover and pay for services.
XDC already had much of the underlying settlement infrastructure in place. Native USDC and Circle’s CCTP went live on XDC in September 2025.
XDC lists two-second block times, six-second finality, and transaction costs around $0.00001, characteristics aimed at high-volume financial applications.
Invoices Could Disappear
Invoices package several functions together. They communicate what is owed, set payment terms, and provide records for reconciliation and accounting. Many businesses then wait days or weeks for the actual transfer to arrive.
Software dealing with software can compress part of that cycle. A service can state its price in a machine-readable format, an authorized agent can evaluate the request, and payment can be settled immediately. Transaction records can then feed directly into treasury and accounting systems.
This comes as agents are taking on increasing responsibility for procurement, cloud spending, portfolio management, and recurring commercial obligations. A company could eventually give an agent a budget and a set of rules, then allow it to buy compute when demand rises, renew services, pay suppliers or rebalance liquidity within those boundaries.
XDC therefore sees today’s one-cent API payment as the smallest version of something much larger.
The card networks see it too. Visa’s stablecoin settlement program reached a $7 billion annualized run rate in April after growing 50% quarter-over-quarter and expanding to nine blockchains. Mastercard announced stablecoin settlement across networks including Ethereum, Solana, Base, Polygon, Tempo and XRPL in June.
The competition is consequently broader than blockchain networks attempting to replace card companies. Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google, Coinbase, Cloudflare and blockchain developers are increasingly building interoperable pieces of the same machine-commerce market.
The Other Half of the Problem
Greater autonomy raises questions about permission and accountability.
An agent paying 3 cents per API request incurs limited financial exposure. However, an agent managing a corporate treasury or procurement budget needs controls around authorization, counterparties, limits, and auditability, which is why the major platforms are converging on different pieces of the same problem. This explains why:
- Google has concentrated on cryptographic mandates that record what a user authorized;
- Cloudflare lets owners impose spending caps and approved merchant lists;
- Mastercard’s system combines agent credentials with permissioning rules;
- XDC AI places spending limits at the wallet level
Those controls determine how quickly agentic payments graduate from micropayments into larger financial relationships.
They also temper the idea that cards and invoices disappear on a fixed timetable. Card networks are already adapting their products for autonomous software, while invoices serve legal, tax, credit and accounting functions that extend beyond transferring funds.
XDC believes that payment and service delivery can happen almost simultaneously: APIs, data, compute, digital services and other machine-to-machine transactions. Success there could establish the habits and technical standards that would later be used for larger transactions.
Khekade expects the terminology itself to disappear as the technology becomes commonplace.
“In 5 years nobody will describe this as agentic payments, the same way nobody today calls a wire transfer an internet payment,” he said. “It will just be how value moves. The interesting question is not whether that happens, it is which networks were actually built for it versus which ones bolted it on afterward.”
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