Bloomberg’s data on payments made by AI agents has been called into question. This was stated by Noah Levine, a partner at the venture firm a16z.
— Noah Levine (@nlevine19) March 11, 2026
Earlier, the agency reported that from February 5 to March 7, 2026, automated systems conducted transactions worth $24 million. The authors of the article cited statistics from the platform x402.org.
Levine presented alternative calculations from Allium Labs, which estimated the on-chain turnover at around $3 million for the same period. The actual figure could be even lower.
An analyst from Artemis, known as OnchainLu, developed a filter to identify fictitious transactions, where wallets trade with themselves or transfer funds between addresses. After applying this filter, the figure dropped to $1.6 million.
“The gap clearly shows how early even the measurement system itself is,” noted the a16z partner.
Betting on the Future
Despite modest current figures, Levine considers the infrastructure around AI agent payments to be highly promising.
He recalled that Coinbase developed the x402 standard, and Stripe, Cloudflare, and Vercel have already introduced their integrations. Google has also launched its own payment protocol for agents.
“None of them are betting on the current $1.6 million per month. They are counting on what this figure will be when agents become default buyers,” concluded Levine.
What Do Digital Assistants Buy?
According to the a16z partner, the main activity of agents is focused on developer tools. Firecrawl sells web scraping for $0.01 per operation, Browserbase offers browser sessions, and Freepik provides image generation.
All of them accept regular cards, but through x402, a user or agent can pay for one-time access without a subscription or registration—just from a wallet.
However, the “pay-per-query” model is gradually moving beyond development, Levine emphasized. For example, the StableEnrich product aggregates data from Google Maps and other sources through a single x402 interface. Sales departments are already using the tool to gather client information.
In February, Coinbase launched Agentic Wallets. The tool allows digital assistants to autonomously store funds, make payments, trade tokens, and interact with DeFi protocols.
In the same month, Binance’s founder predicted the advent of the AI agent era. According to him, every person will have hundreds, thousands, or even millions of assistants making payments in cryptocurrencies.