Visa: AI Agents for Payments Are Accelerating, x402 Has Processed About $15 Million in On-Chain Transaction Volume

BlockBeats reported 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 mainly divided into two categories: one is "large-value commercial payments," where agents perform tasks such as booking flights and managing subscriptions on behalf of users; the other is small-value payments between machines, such as API calls and purchasing computing resources, usually less than 1 USD.

The machine payments protocol x402, incubated by a certain exchange and Cloudflare and later managed by the Linux Foundation, has processed approximately 15 million USD in adjusted transaction volume and about 109.6 million cumulative transactions since its launch in May 2025, with activity mainly concentrated on the Base, Solana, and Polygon networks.

Another machine payment protocol, the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), was built by Stripe and Tempo with contribution support from Visa. Since its launch in March 2026, it has settled about 25 thousand USD and processed around 115 thousand transactions.

Visa stated that the development of AI agent payments has driven the demand for low-cost, high-frequency, machine-native payment infrastructure, and stablecoins and blockchain networks may become important components in micropayment scenarios. The report suggests that in the future, the payment system may not be replaced solely by bank cards or stablecoins, but rather by the integration of both in different scenarios.