Bernstein has identified agentic AI payments as a potential long-term growth opportunity for stablecoins, though the broker cautions that adoption on current machine-payment protocols remains limited and is not yet meaningful to the broader stablecoin investment thesis. The firm shared its assessment in a note distributed to clients on Monday. Analysts said stablecoins could enable machine-to-machine transactions by making microtransactions economically viable and allowing software agents to execute programmable, conditional payments without human involvement.
Early volume figures illustrate how nascent the market remains. Stripe and Tempo‘s machine payments protocol recorded approximately $5,000 in stablecoin volume during its first week of operation. Coinbase‘s x402 protocol, a payment standard that allows AI agents to make automated payments over the internet, handled no more than $25 million over the prior 30 days, with Bernstein’s own data placing the figure closer to $24 million.
Those headline numbers have already attracted scrutiny. a16z partner Noah Levine stated that AI agent payment volume on x402 amounted to just $1.6 million after applying a wash-trading filter developed by Artemis Analytics, well below the $24 million figure initially reported by Bloomberg. In a post on X dated March 11, Levine acknowledged the modest sum but pointed to the significance of the surrounding infrastructure, noting that x402 had already been integrated by Stripe, Cloudflare, Vercel, and Google‘s agent payments protocol.
Bernstein’s central argument is that stablecoins do not depend on machine payments to sustain their growth trajectory. The firm said demand is already being propelled by cross-border business payments, remittances, card-linked products, and neobanking services, positioning AI payments as an additional upside scenario rather than the foundation of the investment case. Total stablecoin payment volume is estimated to have risen to $375 billion in 2025, up from $213 billion in 2024, driven primarily by consumer-to-consumer flows alongside increases across business-to-consumer, business-to-business, and consumer-to-business activity.
The report arrives amid rising industry interest in autonomous payment infrastructure. On the same day that Tempo launched its blockchain and payment protocol, Visa‘s crypto division introduced a tool enabling AI agents to execute same-day payments. The parallel announcements reflect a broader push by financial technology firms to position themselves within the emerging machine-payment ecosystem.
Within the stablecoin market itself, Bernstein identified Coinbase and stablecoin issuer Circle as the strongest proxies for stablecoin upside, citing their shared USDC partnership. The firm also argued that USDC is positioned to capture a dominant portion of machine-payment activity given that it is the most liquid and regulated stablecoin among likely contenders. So far in 2026, USDC has recorded $2.4 trillion in adjusted transaction volume, compared with $1.4 trillion for Tether‘s USDt.
Taken together, Bernstein’s analysis frames agentic AI payments as an emerging but unproven layer on top of a stablecoin market that is already expanding through more established use cases. The infrastructure being assembled around machine payments may prove consequential over time, but analysts suggest investors should not treat early volume figures as indicative of near-term impact on the broader stablecoin landscape.
Originally reported by CoinTelegraph.
