The Honest Number Behind AI Agent Payments

$1.6M adjusted is honest and small. But the x402 model (pay per query, no account, just a wallet) is exactly how agent native commerce should work. We're building on the same assumption at Fere: - Agents need to spend money to do useful work. - The wallet can't be an afterthought bolted on later. - It has to be built into the reasoning loop from day one.

The $24M number is just the beginning. Most x402 volume right now is infrastructure testing and early adopters. Once agent-to-agent commerce hits production scale, this will look like a rounding error. We're building the research layer for this economy — AgentOracle lets agents pay $0.02 per research query via x402. The demand signal from agents wanting real-time data is real.

I had a feeling this would be the case when I was looking at the numbers because I just didn't understand what the payments were being made for. There hasn't been enough real uses cases that I had heard of. Great write up. Happy my hunch was right too haha.

The payment infrastructure gap is real. There isn’t a good way now to properly triage services exchanged vs circular payments to fake usage. Most wallets also still assume a human approval flow. The agents that win will be the ones that can transact autonomously without burning their allowance.

Great data As agent payments scale from $1.6M to billions, fraud will scale too, at machine speed. That's why @Xavionis focuses on behavioural patterns (velocity, retry attacks, transaction pressure) The infrastructure being built needs built-in protection, not just payment rails

@nlevine19 @serpinxbt @a16zcrypto CLI = machine-native payments - agents talking to APIs. Scale brings fraud: retry attacks, velocity abuse, payment probing. Traditional models fail. Behavioural detection (patterns, sequences, pressure) secures this new layer.

@nlevine19 @Reitblat @ForterGlobal you've been highlighting. Programmable guardrails feel like the missing infra layer before volume really scales.Curious if this kind of setup changes how you'd think about safe agent payments at a16z?

@nlevine19 @Reitblat @ForterGlobal @nlevine19 saw this from @OpenClawCash on bounded agent wallets: server-side spending limits, per-tx caps, daily budgets, address whitelisting + audit logs, no privkey exposure to the agent. Aligns perfectly with the rogue spend / prompt-injection risks in agentic commerce

@ninja_dev3 @serpinxbt @nlevine19 @a16zcrypto I track this with Helius' "agent payment" filter on their x402 endpoint—query recent mints and filter for `invoke_status=agent_sig` in the logs, that flag only fires when a private key signs without manual UI clicks.

Wow this is pretty interesting, surely a bummer to see the reported vs actual numbers. But nevertheless a potential for exponential progress very soon

@AIsaOneHQ @nlevine19 @grok Thanks @grok, that makes sense. Speaking of "internet jokes that derive their value from hype and buzz rather than fundamentals," have you heard the one about the pre-seed company who deploys advanced Polygon contracts with self-destructing code for generating smart wallet factories, imitating real x402 activity, and evading Artemis using batch reclaim contract functions to obfuscate the flow of funds as part of a vast washing operation? Hey, neither have we! 😉 https://t.co/EV9XmC4ljN

Low cost and rich data sources. x402 could become a key piece of infrastructure for the AI agent economy.

@0xPia @nlevine19 Already contrary to reality — better pay more grants! https://t.co/kfUNWpEo6P

A large part of agentic payments is not on x402 or on-chain rails.

@a16zcrypto @X402U @nlevine19 It’s grown a lot in the past week

the infrastructure for measuring this isn’t mature yet