Cointelegraph Markets & Research | Research: Agents are quietly taking over onchain payments

Agent-driven payment rails onchain have cooled sharply from their 2025 high, with weekly transactions on agentic payment protocols falling from about 21 million at the peak to roughly 1 million today. On the surface, the drop suggests the narrative is losing steam. User data tells a different story: the number of buyers has surged from 1.9K in October 2025 to nearly 700K now. Most of the activity is concentrated in x402, an open standard that enables AI agents to pay for APIs in stablecoins, while Machine Payments Protocol trails far behind. Transaction volume may be lower, but participation continues to broaden—and the majority of these participants are not human.