Coinbase’s x402 transactions explode over 10,000% in a month

An online payments protocol introduced by Coinbase in May that enables AI agents to transact in stablecoins over the internet has seen more than a 10,000% increase in transaction activity over a last month.

At the time, Coinbase said x402 fixes “the internet’s first mistake” by resurrecting the Internet Communication Protocol’s Hypertext Transfer Protocol 402 — or HTTP 402 — to create a seamless payment system native to the internet.

It lets AI — and humans — pay directly while using a website or app: they request something, receive a HTTP 402 “Payment Required” prompt, and then send a signed stablecoin payment, which x402 then verifies automatically. No credit cards required.

There were nearly 500,000 x402 transactions between Oct. 14 and 20, marking a 10,780% rise in comparison to levels seen four weeks earlier, according to Dune Analytics data.

Transaction activity went even higher on Friday, with other Dune Analytics data showing a record 239,505 transactions were made, while on Thursday, a record $332,000 in transaction volume was posted.

It comes as tech-focused venture capital firm a16z’s crypto arm mentioned agentic AI in its 2025 State of Crypto report earlier this week — where it anticipated that autonomous transactions could reach $30 trillion by 2030.

Without the need for human intervention in managing API calls, storage, and computation, agentic AIs could enable everything from self-driving taxis covering their own costs with stablecoins to apps automatically using stablecoins to store data permanently, Coinbase development team members Kevin Leffew and Lincoln Murr said in August.