Crypto rails are becoming the default payment layer for AI agents — and the infrastructure race is already on!

AI agents settled over $73 million across roughly 176 million blockchain transactions in the past year, according to a new report from Keyrock — and nearly all of it cleared in USDC. The volumes are a rounding error next to Visa's $14.5 trillion annual throughput, but the speed at which the infrastructure stack is forming is the real story.

The economics explain the shift. Some 76% of agent transactions fall below the 30-cent fixed-fee floor that card rails impose, with most payments ranging between one and ten cents. Stablecoin settlement on chains like Base costs fractions of a cent, making crypto the only practical rail for software agents autonomously buying data, cloud compute, or API access in real time.

Coinbase, Stripe, Google, and Visa are already building competing systems.