AI Agents Made 6.4 Million Payments—and Proved Trust Is the Bottleneck

AI agents completed 6.4 million x402 payments across Base and Solana over 35 days in 2026, according to BeInCrypto Intelligence’s State of AI Agent Payments 2026, but the activity generated just $119,947, with more than 90% of payments below one cent. The report also found that four selected Hyperliquid connections saw AI-labelled applications account for only 0.55% of trading value, while unlabelled AI activity could not be measured.

The payment infrastructure is moving faster than its commercial use. “Micropayments could remain the majority of transactions while trading and treasury operations account for a growing share of the value moved,” said Amir Forouzani, co-founder and CEO of Puffer Labs. Saad Naja, founder and CEO of Hygentra, expects AI trading to expand more quickly: “I expect the next 12 months to be a breakout year for agent trading, although micropayments will still dominate transaction count. In 5 years I expect 80% of trading will be agentic.”

Security remains a central obstacle. In May 2026, a public post carrying Morse-coded instructions caused an AI-linked wallet to send $175,000, with roughly 80% recovered. BeInCrypto Intelligence identified two incidents involving $281,200 transferred to attacker-controlled wallets before recoveries; neither required breaking a blockchain signature because the agents acted on instructions they should have rejected.

“A securely stored private key can still authorize a disastrous transaction if the agent has been manipulated by a malicious website, invoice or response from another service… Spending limits alone are insufficient. You also need to control whose instructions the agent accepts and enforce its permissions independently of the model,” Forouzani warned. Markus Levin, co-founder of XYO, described the risk of shared automated purchasing: “When thousands of agents buy the same inexpensive feed and act on it at machine speed, one bad input gets repeated across all of them at once, and a spending cap set per agent does very little to contain that.”

Finality creates another constraint. Benedikt Bünz, co-founder and chief scientist at Espresso Systems, said agents spending before an underlying transaction is final face a distinct exposure: “Ethereum transactions are only final after 16 minutes, i.e., they could be reverted before that. Agents either need to sit idle for that time or make their next move on a payment that could still be reversed.”