Bernstein says agentic AI payments could boost stablecoin demand over time, even as current machine payment volumes remain small and disputed.
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.
