AI agents are on a shopping spree: Total payments on Base blockchain eclipse 138 million, Chainalysis finds

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 with a task, it can pay to get up-to-date information, ask a more capable AI model for help, or use an automated tool to check software code for security flaws.

More than 87% of these payments were for less than 10 cents, per the report.

At those amounts, the fee for processing a credit card payment can cost more than the service itself.

That makes blockchains an ideal alternative for bots buying services in small amounts, according to Eric Jardine, head of research at Chainalysis.

“You have this perfect combination of speed plus low cost to settle, and that’s the sort of thing that you would need if you were doing true AI-to-AI commerce,” Jardine told Fortune .

“The trend is likely to be exponential “ Agentic commerce has proliferated over the past year, and its use cases have spanned from online shopping to travel booking and payments settlement.

It has also given AI systems a bigger role in deciding what to buy and how to pay.

For consumers and businesses, this means handing AI systems not just tasks, but also spending decisions.

Crypto companies have played a key role in spurring their popularity in the United States.