Agentic Transactions Spark Blockchain Scalability Concerns
Avalanche Treasury Company CEO Bart Smith warns that a surge in agentic transactions could cause a new blockchain scalability crunch.
This issue is not about the value of transactions, but rather their volume. AI agents can submit thousands of sub-dollar micropayments in a single timeframe, which are necessary for functions such as API calls and data retrieval.
According to Visa's stablecoin dashboard, agentic payments processed through x402 and MPP protocols totaled $7.5 million in dollar value over the past six months, but this was spread across 100 million individual transactions, resulting in an average transaction size of $0.0746.
Smith believes that this will bring the technical differences between chains back into sharp focus, as major L1 networks have taken differing pathways to meet future demand, with Solana prioritizing high throughput on a shared chain and Ethereum outsourcing execution to Layer 2 rollup networks.