Can AI agents become the first truly large-scale application scenario of cryptocurrency?

Cryptocurrency spent 17 years looking for a payment application scenario that was more important than speculation. The customer who ultimately brought this scenario may not be human.

According to a report released by market maker Keyrock in May, AI agents completed 176 million online payments in the 12 months ending April 2026. The total amount of these payments was US$73 million, which was almost negligible in the face of the Visa network, but the number of transactions was considerable. It is this growth that has prompted Coinbase, AWS, Stripe and now BNB Chain to build payment tracks for software.

What is an AI agent?

The chatbot answers questions, while the AI agent completes the task. ChatGPT generation's AI is able to conduct conversations, and the next generation has upgraded its tools. They can browse the web, call APIs, execute code, and complete more and more types of tasks on their own. AI agents string together tools to achieve a certain goal, whether it's booking flights or rebalancing a portfolio. More advanced models can even decide their next move without having to wait for your instructions.

Cryptocurrency AI proxy adds a wallet on top of this. Since blockchain wallets only hold simple encryption keys and no account application is required, software like AI agents can create and access wallets on their own. This wallet allows agents to make money, hold and spend money without having to humans click "confirm" at every step.

Why does AI agents need cryptocurrency?

Because Know Your Customer (KYC) rules are tied to individuals or legal entities, AI agents cannot open bank accounts in their own name. Visa and Mastercard have found workaround: Their agent programs let humans set spending limits, and then let the agent use the human's card to spend. This model applies to shopping and holds people accountable, but does not apply to machine-to-machine transactions.

Keyrock's report (produced by the company in conjunction with Coinbase and Virtuals) found that the median amount paid by agents ranged from $0.01 to $0.10, with 76% of agent transactions being below the minimum fee of $0.30 charged by card networks. An agent pays 0.1 cents for an API call, but cannot use a payment track that costs 300 times the purchase price. This is where stablecoins show their value. Stable coins, which are transmitted on low-cost L1 and L2, can settle these payments in seconds, cost less than a penny, operate 24 hours a day, and require no registration.

What AI agents are active on the chain today?

Most of the proxy tokens launched during the 2024-2025 mania did little beyond post social media posts. A handful of projects launched usable products, and only a handful are still thriving today.

Bankr executes transactions for users-users only need to issue simple English instructions on the X platform. This month, it added support for Robinhood Wallet. Clanker is another Base-based agent that deploys new tokens on command and has processed thousands of issues. In January, an agent called Clawdbot (built on Bankr and Clanker) earned approximately $100,000 in transaction fees overnight and then deployed its own token vesting contract to lock in funds. AIXBT, a market analysis agent from the Virtuals ecosystem, has become one of the most watched accounts in the cryptocurrency space. In an early experiment, one agent in the Robin project hired another agent and paid for it through x402-with no one intervening the entire time.

You can focus on this area on CoinMarketCap's AI Proxy Tokens page. One thing is obvious: the projects are concentrated in the financial sector, and trading, portfolio management and market analysis are the main application scenarios for cryptocurrency AI agents. Blockchain is inherently designed to process money, so it is not surprising that AI agents find a breakthrough here in the first place. But the price does not reflect its potential, as most proxy tokens are well below their January 2025 peak, and this retracement is similar to the trend of the overall cryptocurrency market rather than a failure unique to the field.

Infrastructure promotion

Coinbase built the x402 protocol around HTTP 402, a "pay-required" status code that had been idle for 30 years. It allowed any server to charge access fees through micropayments in stablecoin, and developers quickly adopted the protocol. Coinbase reported that the transaction volume of the agreement in its first year of launch exceeded US$100 million, and 90% of the transaction volume of on-chain proxy stablecoin occurred on Base L2. Chainalysis and independent analysts estimate that about half of x402 trading volume comes from a memecoin casting game called Ping, rather than commercial use, and that actual daily expenses on services remain limited. However, quality is improving. Transactions worth more than $1 now account for 95% of the total value of the agreement, up from only 49% at the beginning of 2025.

Other major players have also joined the AI agent field. Recent developments in this area include:

x402 moving towards neutrality: Coinbase handed over the agreement to the Linux Foundation in April 2026, with Visa, Stripe, Google, Microsoft and Cloudflare becoming founding members.

Network access: Cloudflare launched a gateway in July that allows websites to charge agents for page and data fees through x402;Apify placed 20,000 automation tools behind the x402 pay wall;Coinbase partnered with AWS to enable agents to pay for on-demand use computing resources.

BNB Chain is building an agent-oriented blockchain: On July 8, BNB Chain announced a new Layer-1 plan for AI proxies and high-frequency trading.

Technology and payment giants enter: Google's AP2 protocol, Stripe and OpenAI's Instant Checkout, and Visa's Intelligent Commerce have all launched proxy payment plans since early 2025.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in June that in the past year, agents have made more than 160 million payments through x402 alone. If this trend continues to grow, agents could become a new category of Internet users and the first truly large-scale application scenario for cryptocurrencies-each agent requires a wallet, a crypto balance, and a low-cost blockchain to run.

How to start using AI agents

You can learn about this area without spending a penny: Focus on an agent like AIXBT and determine whether its output is better than the analysts you are currently reading. If you want to experience it firsthand, try using a commission trading agent like Bankr, investing a small amount of money and setting strict spending limits (agent mistakes will be deducted from your balance). Other options include Hey Anon and GRIFFAIN.

If you're creative, the x402 documentation shows how to launch a paid API endpoint in a few hours. CoinMarketCap AI agent center has also been launched. Before buying any proxy tokens, let AskCMC AI analyze for you: does it have users, revenue and products, or is it just an X account?