Stablecoins Take Center Stage as AI Agents Start Buying Data and Services

Major companies including Coinbase, Circle, and Visa are building payment infrastructure for AI agents. This development has led to stablecoins emerging as a major payment method.

The majority of payments made through Coinbase's AI-agent payment protocol, x402, are settled in the dollar stablecoin USDC. In fact, about 99% of payments on this platform are made in USDC. The main use cases for these small payments have been micropayments for API calls and access to data and computing resources.

Coinbase's head of AI product, Lincoln Murr, estimated that if AI agents increasingly make multiple low-cost purchases of data and services to complete a single task, stablecoins could become a leading method for machine-to-machine payments. This prediction is based on the fact that existing card networks still have an advantage in larger payments due to their broad merchant networks, credit, and systems for refunds and dispute resolution.