AI agents are starting to pay with crypto as Coinbase, Stripe and Visa want in, Keyrock report says
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents autonomously spending money online is still a tiny market, but some of the worlds largest tech, payments and crypto firms are already racing to build the infrastructure for it, Keyrock said in a new report. The crypto trading and investment firm estimated that AI agents settled over $73 million across roughly 176 million transactions on blockchain rails between May 2025 and April 2026. The volumes remain negligible compared to traditional finance (TradFi). Visa, for example, alone processes $14.5 trillion annually. But the significance lies less in the headline U.S. dollar value and more in how quickly the infrastructure stack is forming, the report argued. Global firms such as Coinbase (COIN), Stripe, Google (GOOG) and Visa (V) all rolled out competing systems for machine-to-machine payments. The broader idea behind agentic payments is that software increasingly consumes digital services autonomously rather than through human-managed subscriptions and accounts. An AI trading agent, for example, could continuously purchase market data, cloud computing or AI-generated analysis in tiny increments throughout the day without a human authorizing each payment manually. That potential is driving ambitious forecasts how big the agentic payment sector could grow. Gartner projects AI agents could intermediate $15 trillion in purchases by 2028,