BlockBeats News, May 24th, Keyrock's latest report shows that Crypto Rails are gradually becoming the default payment layer for AI Agents. Over the past year, AI Agents have conducted over 176 million transactions via blockchain, with a settlement value exceeding $73 million. As AI Agents start autonomously purchasing data, cloud computing power, API services, and AI inference resources, the traditional credit card payment system has struggled to adapt to high-frequency, micro-payment scenarios. Currently, about 76% of Agent payments are below 30 cents, and some on-chain stablecoin transfer costs are only "a fraction of a cent."

Coinbase, Stripe, Google, and Visa have all started to layout the infrastructure for machine-to-machine payments. Among them, Coinbase's x402 protocol allows AI Agents to directly use USDC for on-chain analytics and cloud service fees. Data shows that currently 98.6% of AI Agent payments are settled via USDC. The report suggests that this further strengthens Circle's prominent position in the crypto payment sector but also indicates an increasing industry reliance on a single stablecoin issuer.