x402 Payments Slide 77% as Wallet Approvals Limit AI Agent Micropayments

x402 payment volume dropped from $5.15 million in November 2025 to $1.19 million by May 2026, while transaction counts recovered to 2.89 million in May at an average $0.52 each. The pattern points to agents making frequent sub-dollar payments for APIs, data, and compute, where manual wallet approvals can cost more than the transfer itself.