a16z: AI Agent payment volume is far lower than reported data, but infrastructure development is accelerating

a16z partner Noah Levine posted on the X platform, stating that a previous Bloomberg article cited data from x402.org claiming that AI agents completed $24 million in payments within 30 days. However, data from Allium Labs shows that the actual transaction volume for AI agents during the same period was about $3 million, and after excluding wash trading, it was approximately $1.6 million.

Levine noted that current AI payment activities are mainly concentrated in the developer tools sector, including web scraping platform Firecrawl, AI browser Browserbase, and AI image platform Freepik. Companies like Stripe, Cloudflare, and Vercel have integrated the payment standard x402 developed by Coinbase, and Google has also embedded this system into its agent payment protocol. Levine mentioned that the $1.6 million transaction volume is not large, but the infrastructure built around it is substantial, as these companies are betting on the market prospects once AI agents become the default buyers. Additionally, Coinbase announced that its x402 Facilitator has added support for Polygon, allowing developers to accept USDC payments on Polygon, Base, and Solana. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong stated that the transaction volume of AI agents will soon surpass that of humans.