Bernstein said agentic AI payments could become a long-term growth opportunity for stablecoins, even though adoption on today’s machine-payment protocols remains small and is not yet material to the broader stablecoin investment case.
In a Monday note shared with Cointelegraph, the broker said stablecoins could help unlock machine-to-machine payments by making microtransactions viable and enabling programmable, conditional payments between software agents without a human in the loop.
But Bernstein said traction so far has been limited. The note said Stripe and Tempo’s machine payments protocol recorded about $5,000 in stablecoin volume in its first week, while Coinbase’s x402 protocol handled no more than $25 million over the last 30 days. Bernstein’s chart put x402 volume at about $24 million over that period. x402 is a payment standard developed by Coinbase that lets AI agents automatically make payments over the internet.
The bigger point for Bernstein was that stablecoins do not need machine payments to succeed in order to keep growing. The note said stablecoin demand is already being driven by cross-border business payments, remittances, card-linked products and neobanking, making AI payments an upside case rather than the core thesis.
The report follows growing interest in autonomous payment solutions. On Thursday, Visa’s crypto division launched a tool allowing AI agents to make same-day payments on the same day that Stripe-backed Tempo launched its blockchain and payment protocol.
X402 protocol payment flow. Source: Bernstein
Bernstein said broader payment use cases are still the real growth engine for stablecoins. Its note estimated total stablecoin payment volume rose to $375 billion in 2025 from $213 billion in 2024, led by consumer-to-consumer flows, while business-to-consumer, business-to-business and consumer-to-business activity also increased.
Related: Stablecoin issuers and fintechs race to own payment rails
Coinbase, Circle remain best “proxies” for stablecoin adoption
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and stablecoin issuer Circle remain the “best proxies for stablecoin upside” due to their $USDC ($USDC) partnership, according to Bernstein.
It also argued that $USDC is likely to capture a dominant share of machine-payment activity because it is the most liquid and regulated stablecoin among likely candidates.
So far in 2026, $USDC recorded $2.4 trillion in adjusted transaction volume while Tether’s USDt (USDT) recorded $1.4 trillion.
Total adjusted stablecoin transaction volume, in trillion. Source: Bernstein
Wash trading concerns cloud early metrics
Some of the headline machine-payment numbers have already drawn skepticism.
AI Agent payment volume on x402 only amounted to $1.6 million after applying the wash trading filter developed by Artemis Analytics, which is significantly lower than the initial $24 million reported by news outlet Bloomberg, claimed a16z partner Noah Levine.
Source: Noah Levine
“$1.6 million is not a big number. But the infrastructure being built around it is,” wrote Levine in a March 11 X post, adding that x402 was already integrated by the likes of Stripe, Cloudflare, Vercel and Google’s agent payments protocol.
Magazine: Crypto wanted to overthrow banks, now it’s becoming them in stablecoin fight
