Chainalysis Report: AI Agents Complete 138 Million Crypto Payments, 88.1% from U.S. Wallets

ChainCatcher report: According to Chainalysis’s report, “Inside North America's $3 trillion crypto economy: Agentic commerce accelerates,” AI agents have completed over 138 million transactions via the x402 payment protocol, which was launched by Coinbase on the Base blockchain, to purchase data, computing power, and access to AI models using cryptocurrency. The report shows that 88.1% of geographically identifiable payments for AI model inference are linked to wallets in the United States, while only 0.1% are linked to wallets in China. Chainalysis Research Director Eric Jardine noted that one possible explanation is that Chinese developers prefer open-weight models such as DeepSeek and Qwen, reducing their reliance on pay-per-use inference services. Wallets linked to China exhibit a different activity pattern, accounting for approximately 90% of geographically identifiable payments for security and code analysis services, with the majority flowing to the AI smart contract auditing platform AgentLisa. Jardine also cautioned that this disparity should not be interpreted as open-source AI weakening the Asian on-chain inference market. Major payment providers including Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe now support the x402 protocol, and Coinbase has begun allowing enterprise customers to accept payments from AI agents.