138 million. That is how many transactions AI agents have made through Coinbase’s x402 protocol on the Base blockchain, according to Chainalysis figures reported by CoinDesk on 14 October.
More than 87 percent of the payments analysed were between one-hundredth of a cent and ten cents. That is the use stablecoins were expected to find first, and the reason agents were thought to need them, since card networks cannot sensibly process a fraction of a cent.
The geography is lopsided. US-linked wallets made 88.1 percent of the geographically identified payments for AI model inference, against 0.1 percent for Chinese-linked wallets.
China’s pattern differs. Chinese-linked wallets made about 90 percent of identified payments for security and code-analysis services, much of it to a smart contract auditing platform called AgentLisa.
Wallet behaviour is changing as well, and quickly. The average time from first funding to first payment fell from 73 days in late 2025 to 18 minutes in the third quarter of 2026.
The caveats are written into the coverage, and they are not small. Wallets that paid on only one day were excluded, and CoinDesk noted that earlier research raised questions about artificial activity on the network.
A transaction count is not a revenue figure, and a count this large invites suspicion. The article gives no dollar total for the 138 million, though it cited 75 million payments worth about $24 million over 30 days in July, and how much of the rest is genuine demand is unanswered.
