Visa and Artemis jointly released an intelligent payment report: the x402 protocol was launched to process 15 million US dollars of transactions in a year, and the AI micropayment era is rapidly arriving

Comparatively, Visa and the on-chain data analysis platform Artemis previously jointly released the “Agentic Payments from the Ground Up” report, which quantitatively analyzed AI smart payment trends based on real-time on-chain data. According to the report, smart commerce should be divided into macro-transactions (AI agents humans complete reservations, subscriptions, etc., to adapt to existing card systems) and micropayments (high-frequency micropayments between machines, far less than 1 US dollar, making it difficult to support traditional payment structures).

The report focuses on analyzing two “machine-native payment” agreements: x402 (developed by Coinbase, Cloudflare, etc., launched in May 2025) as of April 21, 2026, with an adjusted transaction volume of about US$15 million, 109.6 million transactions, 422,000 buyers, and about 5,300 sellers. The activities mainly focused on Base, Solana, and Polygon, settled in USDC; MPP (developed by Stripe and Tempo) (Visa participated, launched in mid-March 2026) The 33-day transaction volume was about 25,000 US dollars, the number of transactions was 115,000, and it also supports on-chain encrypted payments and fiat currency settlements.

According to the report, the jump in AI capabilities (after the release of Claude 4.5 and GPT Codex 5.2 in mid-2025) created demand for programmatic payments, compounded by a reduction in blockchain settlement costs, making micropayments in the 1 cent to 1 dollar range economically viable for the first time. Currently, the boundary between cryptographic native agreements and card payment camps is gradually blurring, but smart payments still face trust challenges such as mispurchases, adversarial attacks, and attribution of responsibility.