AI agents make 138 million crypto payments as U.S. dominates spending on AI models

The United States dominates this emerging market. U.S.linked wallets accounted for 88.1% of the geographically identified payments for AI model inference, compared with just 0.1% for Chinese-linked wallets, the blockchain analytics firm found.

"One possible explanation is that Chinese developers are more inclined to use open-weight models such as DeepSeek and Qwen, reducing their need to purchase metered inference services," Eric Jardine, Chainalysis' head of research, told CoinDesk.

The findings, released Wednesday, come as Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and other payments giants have backed the x402 protocol, while Coinbase has begun allowing business customers to accept payments from AI agents.