AI agents are on a shopping spree: Total transactions 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 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 transactions 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.

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