a16z: AI Agent payment volume is far lower than reported data, but infrastructure construction is accelerating.

Noah Levine, a partner at a16z, wrote on the X platform that a previous Bloomberg article, citing data from x402.org, claimed that AI agents completed $24 million in payments within 30 days. However, Allium Labs data shows that the actual transaction volume of AI agents during the same period was approximately $3 million, and after excluding fraudulent transactions, it was approximately $1.6 million. Levine stated that current AI payment activity is mainly concentrated in the developer tools field, including web crawling platform Firecrawl, AI browser Browserbase, and AI image platform Freepik. Companies such as Stripe, Cloudflare, and Vercel have integrated Coinbase's x402 payment standard, and Google has also embedded the system into its agent payment protocol. Levine stated that while the transaction volume of $1.6 million is not large, the infrastructure built around it is substantial, and these companies are betting on the market potential of AI agents becoming the default buyer. In addition, Coinbase announced that its x402 Facilitator now supports Polygon, allowing developers to accept USDC payments on Polygon, Base, and Solana. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong stated that AI-powered agents will soon surpass human transaction volumes.