Visa-Artemis Report Reveals Surge in AI-Powered Payments, Challenges Ahead
Visa and Artemis have released a joint report on AI-enabled payments, titled 'Agentic Payments from the Ground Up.' The report analyzed real-time blockchain data to quantify trends in AI-powered payments. It found that intelligent business transactions can be divided into macro-trades (AI agents completing tasks like booking or subscription) and micro-payments (machine-to-machine high-frequency small payments under $1).
The report focused on two 'machine native payment' protocols: x402, developed by Coinbase, Cloudflare, and others, which went live in May 2025. By April 21, 2026, it had processed approximately $15 million in transactions, with over 110 million individual payments, 422,000 buyers, and 53,000 sellers. The majority of activity occurred on Base, Solana, and Polygon blockchains, using USDC as the settlement currency.
The report suggests that AI capabilities have surged since the release of Claude 4.5 and GPT Codex 5.2 in mid-2025, creating a demand for programmatic payments. This, combined with decreasing blockchain transaction costs, has made micro-payments between $0.01 and $1 economically viable.
The report also notes that as the boundaries between crypto-native protocols and traditional payment card systems blur, AI-enabled payments face challenges such as trust issues related to misbuying, adversarial attacks, and liability attribution.