Keyrock Report: 76% of AI Agent Transactions Fall Below Visa’s $0.30 Fee Floor

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Keyrock Report: 76% of AI Agent Transactions Fall Below Visa’s $0.30 Fee Floor

According to a recent report by Keyrock, a leading crypto investment firm specializing in market making and digital asset management, AI-powered agents have processed over $73 million in transactions – around 176 million in total – since May 2025. Simultaneously, four major payment systems are emerging, supported by some of the biggest tech companies.

  • Key Takeaways:

  • Keyrock’s May 2026 report found AI agents settled $73M across 176M transactions in just 12 months, with 98.6% in USDC.
  • Coinbase and Stripe each span 5 of 6 payment stack layers, while incumbents deployed over $8B in acquisitions.
  • MiCA, the GENIUS Act, and the EU AI Act all hit enforcement by August 2, 2026, with none covering machine-to-machine payments.

Keyrock ‘Who Pays the Agent’ Analysis: USDC Dominates 98.6% of AI Agent Payments

The report, co-published with Coinbase, Tempo, and Virtuals, documents how machine-to-machine payments moved from a theoretical concept to a functioning ecosystem in one year. Agents now pay for API access, data queries, and compute resources in real time, with no human in the loop. The average transaction size has stabilized near $0.48.

Coinbase built x402, a protocol that repurposes the long-dormant HTTP 402 status code to enable stablecoin payments between machines. Stripe and Tempo co-authored the Machine Payments Protocol, known as MPP, a payment-method-agnostic standard that handles stablecoins, credit cards, and Lightning Network payments through a single HTTP flow. Google released AP2, an authorization layer that allows users to delegate spending authority to agents using cryptographic mandates. Visa extended its existing card rails to provision AI-ready tokenized credentials agents can present at checkout.

Image source: Keyrock report “Who Pays the Agent? The Race for Frictionless Machine Payments.”

Keyrock’s research indicates that these four protocols aren’t simply rivals. Instead, they’re building on top of each other, forming a layered system. AP2 manages who is allowed access, while x402 and MPP handle the financial transactions underneath. The report primarily investigates which companies will control the most of these layers, and therefore, gain the biggest benefits.

The report shows that Coinbase and Stripe are heavily involved in the payment stack, each handling five out of six key areas. Coinbase manages the final settlement of payments using Base, provides wallets through AgentKit, utilizes x402 for payment processing, and participates in governance via AP2. Stripe operates similarly with Tempo for settlement, Privy for wallets, Bridge for routing payments, and MPP for the core payment protocol. Circle is involved in four layers, while Google and Visa currently handle two and one layer respectively.

The economics make crypto rails close to mandatory for this market. Keyrock’s data shows that 76 percent of agent transactions fall below the $0.30 fixed-fee floor charged by card networks. A USDC transfer on Base costs approximately $0.0001, which is roughly 0.03 percent of a $0.31 payment. On Stripe, that same payment would cost $0.309 in fees, leaving the merchant with $0.001.

One of the most concentrated findings in the report is stablecoin dominance. Of the 176 million payments recorded, 98.6 percent settled in USDC. Keyrock flags this as a systemic risk that few in the industry are publicly addressing. If Circle faces a regulatory challenge, a de-peg event, or a technical outage, the agent payments ecosystem has no fallback.

Incumbents moved to secure positions across the stack through acquisitions. Capital One acquired Brex for $5.15 billion. Mastercard purchased BVNK for $1.8 billion. Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion. Together, these and related deals represent more than $8 billion deployed in twelve months.

Keyrock notes that machines already dominate onchain activity. On Gnosis Chain, AI agents via the Olas network account for over 75 percent of Safe transactions on peak days. On Base and Optimism, bots and automated contracts consume more than 50 percent of gas. The current activity is largely extractive, including arbitrage and volume farming. The shift to productive agent commerce, where agents pay for services that create value for end users, is what the new infrastructure is designed to enable.

The report also points to the failure of OpenAI‘s ChatGPT Instant Checkout, which was shelved in March 2026 after only around 30 Shopify merchants actively used it. The product lacked sales tax collection, fraud prevention, and multi-item cart support. Keyrock interprets the outcome as confirmation that agents transacting through protocol endpoints, not visual checkout flows, is the viable model.

The biggest challenge across all areas is the lack of clear rules. Several important regulations are coming into force around the same time: MiCA on July 1, 2026, the GENIUS Act on July 18th, and key parts of the EU AI Act on August 2nd. However, none of these regulations currently address transactions made automatically between machines.

Liability is unresolved. With credit cards, merchants bear chargeback risk and consumers receive protection. With stablecoins, once funds land in a merchant wallet they cannot be recalled. As x402 creator Erik Reppel of Coinbase told Keyrock, the risk moves entirely to the consumer. American Express moved first to address this commercially, launching Agent Purchase Protection on April 14, 2026, covering erroneous purchases made by verified agents within its registered ecosystem.

The report finds that a machine economy is already in place, though it isn’t currently facilitating significant transactions. The necessary technical foundation is established, but clear rules and regulations are still lacking.

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2026-05-25 00:58