AI Agents Not Driving Coinbase's x402 Payment Volume
TRM Labs has released a report examining $52.7 million in x402 settlements across Base, Solana, and Polygon since May 2025. The study found that most of this volume isn't coming from AI agents.
After excluding self-payments and other anomalous flows, researchers estimated that just 0.6%, 7.5% of the remaining commerce by value appeared to come from AI agents. TRM's models can't conclusively distinguish between AI agents and scripts.
The report notes that an ordinary script can follow the same sequence as an AI agent without any AI involvement. Scheduled jobs, load tests, and self-dealing can also produce similar blockchain records.
TRM removed $26.7 million in suspicious activity from their analysis, leaving $25.62 million in likely commerce. They then screened for facilitator-broadcast payments with varying amounts averaging under $1. A stricter test required that pattern across months, plus public agent registration or payments to multiple sellers.
USDC accounted for 99.6% of settled value, or $52.47 million. The report identifies gaps in assigning responsibility for agent payments and calls for more accurate registration, counterparty reputation information, and monitoring suited to large numbers of small payments.