AI agents are starting to buy things. But how much?
The numbers are inconsistent. Bloomberg reported that AI agents made $24 million in payments over a 30-day period, citing data from x402.org. Allium’s onchain data shows roughly $3 million over the same period. Filter out wash trades and the estimate shrinks further.
The gap tells you how early-stage even the measurement infrastructure is.
What Agents Are Actually Buying
Most of the activity is around developer tools. Firecrawl sells web scraping for $0.01 per query. Browserbase sells browser sessions. Freepik sells image generation. These companies all accept cards, but x402 lets a developer or agent try the tool once without committing to a subscription. Pay per query, no account, just a wallet.
The pay-per-query model is also reaching beyond developer tools. Merit Systems built a product called StableEnrich that aggregates data from providers like Apollo, Google Maps, and Whitepages behind a single x402 endpoint. Each request costs pennies. Its customers are sales teams whose AI agents call the endpoint and pay automatically. The users aren’t there for crypto; they are there for leads. The payment rail is not what matters.
The Honest Number
Most of the numbers circulating are noise.
Lucas Shin, an analyst at Artemis Analytics, built a wash trading filter for x402 volume, flagging wallets that repeatedly transacted with themselves or cycled funds between addresses. Applied over the same 30-day period, the adjusted number is $1.6 million.
$24 million reported. $3 million onchain. $1.6 million after removing wash trades.
$1.6 million is not a big number. But the infrastructure being built around it is.
Coinbase built the x402 protocol. Stripe, Cloudflare, and Vercel followed with integrations. Google embedded x402 into its agent payments protocol. None of them are betting on $1.6 million a month. They are betting on what the number looks like when agents become the default buyer.
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I pulled the data for this article from Allium, an onchain analytics provider with an x402 endpoint. Total research cost: $0.47.
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Noah Levine is an investment partner at a16z crypto.
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