Bloomberg's data on payments made by AI agents is inaccurate, according to Noah Levine, a partner at venture firm a16z.
— Noah Levine (@nlevine19) March 11, 2026
Previously, the agency reported that from February 5 to March 7, 2026, automated systems conducted transactions totaling $24 million. The authors referenced statistics from the platform x402.org.
Levine provided alternative calculations from Allium Labs, which indicated that the on-chain turnover during the same period was about $3 million, with the actual figure potentially being even lower.
Analyst Artemis, known as OnchainLu, developed a filter to identify fake transactions, where wallets trade with themselves or transfer funds between addresses. After applying this filter, the value dropped to $1.6 million.
Source: X/Artemis.“The gap clearly shows how early the measurement system itself is,” noted the a16z partner.
Betting on the Future
Despite the modest current figures, Levine believes the infrastructure surrounding payment AI agents is highly promising.
He reminded us that Coinbase developed the x402 standard, while Stripe, Cloudflare, and Vercel have already introduced their integrations. Google has also launched its own payment protocol for agents.
“None of them are betting on the current $1.6 million per month. They are anticipating what this figure will be when agents become default buyers,” concluded Levine.
What Are Digital Assistants Buying?
According to the a16z partner, the primary activity of agents is centered around tools for developers. Firecrawl sells web scraping for $0.01 per operation, Browserbase offers browser sessions, and Freepik provides image generation.
All of them accept regular cards, but through x402, users or agents can pay for one-time access without subscriptions or registrations—simply from their wallets.
However, the “pay-per-request” model is gradually moving beyond development, Levine emphasized. For instance, the StableEnrich product aggregates data from Google Maps and other sources through a single x402 interface. Sales departments are already using this tool to gather customer information.
In February, Coinbase launched Agentic Wallets, allowing digital assistants to autonomously store funds, make payments, trade tokens, and interact with DeFi protocols.
In the same month, Binance's founder predicted the onset of an era of AI agents. He stated that every person would have hundreds, thousands, or even millions of assistants making payments in cryptocurrencies.