Although weekly transactions on agentic payment protocols have fallen from a peak of around 21 million in 2025 to roughly 1 million today, user adoption continues to expand rapidly.
The number of buyers has grown from just 1,900 in October 2025 to nearly 700,000 today. Much of this growth is driven by x402, the open standard that enables AI agents to pay for APIs using stablecoins, while competing protocols remain far behind.
The key takeaway is that transaction volume may be lower, but the participant base keeps growing. Increasingly, these payment rails are being used by autonomous AI agents rather than humans, signaling a major shift in how on-chain economic activity is evolving.
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