In the fields of technology, finance, and media, the hottest topic right now is none other than AI Agent. And in financial scenarios, agentic payments are repeatedly discussed as the next major disruption—its magnitude is considered comparable to contactless payments.
But behind those eye-catching numbers, what is the reality? BeInCrypto's latest research, "The State of AI Agent Payments 2026," examined this question.
Between late July and August 2026, the research team tracked payment data recorded on x402. x402 is one of the most widely used open-source payment protocols by AI Agents. BeInCrypto found that 6.4 million recorded payments had a total value of less than $120,000; more than 90% of agentic payments were worth less than 1 cent each.
What did AI Agents buy with a few cents?
Another review of the x402 resource directory helps explain these purchases. The most-used paid resource was AI-generated cryptocurrency security assessments, charged at 2 cents per request; web search followed closely behind.
What Agents buy is the information needed to complete a task, one request at a time.
Imagine an AI assistant that helps you plan a vacation: it could first pay a small fee to check bookable flights, then pay to search for destination-related information. Flight availability queries and paid web searches both appeared in this directory review. These purchases provide the assistant with the information it needs to answer your question.
Solana carries 99.2% of transactions
In the sample, Solana carried 99.2% of transactions. Activity was highly concentrated: an 8-day burst period on Solana accounted for 94.5% of all recorded payments.
This concentration is noteworthy. Millions of transfers may come from only a small group of active wallets, which makes transaction count a poor metric for measuring "how many businesses are using this technology."
Are Agents ready to handle larger-scale payments?
In an ad hoc readiness assessment, micropayments scored the highest, at 60.7 points out of 100; transaction and investment Agents scored 39.1, while institutional workflows scored only 12 points.
These scores reflect existing evidence, not success rates.
Of the 12 institutional workflows evaluated, 6 could initiate or settle payments within human-set permission boundaries, but evidence about their actual usage remains limited.
The size of the amounts entrusted to software also changes the nature of the risk. Will Papper, Director of Product for Agentic Payments at Cloudflare, said: "If an Agent is managing $10, your concern about how it spends money will be far less than when it is managing $1,000."
