Visa and Artemis Report on AI Agent Payments; x402 Processes $15M in On-Chain Volume

Huo Xing Finance reports that on July 16, Visa released a joint research report with Artemis titled “Agentic Payments from the Ground Up,” analyzing the development of AI agent payments and on-chain data. The report shows that AI agent payments are primarily divided into two categories: one involves agents performing “high-value commercial payments” on behalf of users, such as booking flights or managing subscriptions; the other consists of micropayments between machines, such as API calls or purchasing computing resources, typically under $1. Since its launch in May 2025, the machine payment protocol x402, incubated by Coinbase and Cloudflare and later managed by the Linux Foundation, has processed approximately $15 million in adjusted transaction volume across about 109.6 million cumulative transactions, with primary activity concentrated on the Base, Solana, and Polygon networks. Another machine payment protocol, the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), built by Stripe and Tempo with support from Visa, has settled approximately $25,000 and processed around 115,000 transactions since its launch in March 2026. Visa states that the growth of AI agent payments is driving demand for low-cost, high-frequency, machine-native payment infrastructure, with stablecoins and blockchain networks likely becoming key components in micropayment scenarios. The report concludes that future payment systems will not be replaced solely by credit cards or stablecoins, but rather will involve a convergence of both across different use cases.