Visa, together with Artemis, releases an AI agent payment on-chain data report

Deep Tide TechFlow news: On July 16, according to a report on Visa’s official website, Visa and Artemis jointly released a report that, based on real-time on-chain data, provides an in-depth analysis of the current state and trends of AI agent payments. The report states that AI agent payments can be divided into two categories: first, “macro commerce,” where agents replace users to complete tasks such as booking tickets and subscriptions, which is similar to traditional e-commerce payments; second, “micro commerce,” such as high-frequency small-value API calls between software systems, where the per-transaction amount is typically less than 1 cent.

On-chain data shows that the open protocol x402, incubated by Coinbase and Cloudflare and currently hosted by the Linux Foundation, has processed about 109 million transactions since it launched in May 2025; the adjusted transaction volume is about $15 million. It is mainly active on the Base, Solana, and Polygon networks. The Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), built jointly by Stripe and Tempo with contributions from Visa, went live in mid-March 2026 and has completed about 115k transactions within a few weeks, with settlement amounts of about $25k.

The report notes that blockchain settlement costs have dropped to extremely low levels, making small payments in the range of 1 cent to $1 economically viable for the first time. However, AI agent payments still face major challenges at the legal and regulatory level, including trust, liability attribution, and dispute resolution. Visa said its goal is to build a unified infrastructure that supports both card-native trust authorization and machine-native settlement, driving the ongoing integration of the two systems.