AI agents are on a shopping spree: Total payments on Base blockchain eclipse 138 million, Chainalysis finds
Source: Fortune ·
Faster spending and repeat funding suggest developers are making automated commerce part of everyday work.
From the source
The field of agentic commerce, which describes the use of AI agents to carry out Internet transactions, is rapidly maturing, and crypto is fueling the boom. That’s according to a new report by the blockchain analytics platform Chainalysis, which found developers are increasingly giving AI agents their own budgets to buy the computing power, live web data, and code tools they need to complete tasks. The growth of agentic commerce over the past 15 months has been steep. On Base, the Coinbase-incubated blockchain, cumulative payments through the x402 protocol—which lets bots automatically pay for online services using crypto—rose from about 1,500 in mid-2025 to more than 138 million by the third quarter of 2026. In practice, agentic commerce entails providing an AI bot with an allowance: A developer funds the bot’s wallet with stablecoins—typically Circle’s dollar-pegged USDC—and the bot pays for services as it works, without asking a person to approve each purchase. When it needs help…