AI agents made 138 million crypto payments. What did they buy?

More than 138 million x402 payments were recorded on Base in Chainalysis’s 2026 North America study. The count is large; the typical payment is tiny. Some software buys data, code checks and access to AI models, while earlier activity included a speculative token mint that generated transactions without proving a durable service economy. The more revealing figures concern wallets that return, refill and pay named categories of providers. The October 14 Chainalysis study identifies categories that give the 138 million count an economic context: AI model inference, code analysis, search and data feeds, payments infrastructure, agent tools, gaming and token…