Keyrock Report: 76% of AI Agent Transactions Fall Below Visa's $0.30 Fee Floor
A new report from Keyrock, a global crypto investment group leading in market making, asset management, OTC, and options trading for digital assets, finds that artificial intelligence (AI) agents have settled more than $73 million across approximately 176 million transactions since May 2025, while four competing payment architectures have taken shape, backed by some of the largest companies in technology. Key Takeaways:Keyrocks May 2026 report found AI agents settled $73M across 176M transactions in just 12 months, with 98.6% in $USDC.Coinbase and Stripe each span 5 of 6 payment stack layers, while incumbents deployed over $8B in acquisitions.MiCA, the $GENIUS Act, and the EU AI Act all hit enforcement by August 2, 2026, with none covering machine-to-machine payments. Keyrock ‘Who Pays the Agent’ Analysis: $USDC Dominates 98.6% of AI Agent Payments The report, co-published with Coinbase, Tempo, and Virtuals, documents how machine-to-machine payments moved from a theoretical concept to a functioning ecosystem in one year. Agents now pay for API access, data queries, and compute resources in real time, with no human in the loop. The average transaction size has stabilized near $0.48. Coinbase built x402, a protocol that repurposes the long-dormant HTTP 402 status code to enable stablecoin payments between machines. Stripe and