U.S. Wallets Account for 88.1% of Identifiable AI Inference Payments

AI agents have completed more than 138 million transactions through x402, a payment protocol incubated by Coinbase on the Base blockchain, as U.S.-linked wallets accounted for most identifiable payments for AI model inference.

U.S.-linked wallets represented 88.1% of inference payments with identifiable locations, compared with 0.1% for China-linked wallets. Those figures cover AI model inference payments, not all crypto payments related to artificial intelligence.

China-linked wallets accounted for about 90% of identifiable payments for security and code-analysis services. Most of those payments went to AgentLisa, an AI platform for smart-contract auditing.

Greater use of open-weight models such as DeepSeek and Qwen could help explain China’s small share of metered inference-service payments. The gap does not establish that open-source AI is weakening Asia’s on-chain inference market.

The x402 transactions have been used to buy data, computing power and access to AI models. Visa, Mastercard and Stripe support the protocol, while Coinbase has begun allowing business customers to accept payments from AI agents.