A new Chainalysis report found that autonomous AI agents made more than 138 million cryptocurrency payments through x402, a Coinbase-incubated protocol, by Q3 2026. This represents a surge from approximately 1,500 payments in mid-2025. Most of these payments were tiny, ranging from as little as a hundredth of a cent (0.01 cents) to 10 cents. U.S.-linked wallets accounted for 88.1% of geographically identifiable spending on AI model inference.