AI Agents Make Millions of Micro-Payments with Machine Payments

Millions of payments are now made by software rather than people, thanks to AI agents that use machine payments. The x402 standard is an open standard that lets a server answer a request with an HTTP 402 status code, price, and wallet address. A client then pays in a stablecoin and retries.

The x402 standard counted 75.41 million transactions in the past 30 days as of September 10, 2026. The XRP Ledger's agent hub shows 4.94 million agent payments all time, but only about $5,932 worth of XRP and $4,450 RLUSD settled.

Tether's wallet toolkit gives an AI agent a self-custodial wallet with human approval on every write operation, unless the developer chooses the command-line mode where an unlocked session can be spent by any process running as that user.