Almost the entire automated payment ecosystem runs on a single stablecoin. More than 98% of all settlements made by AI customers last year were processed at Circle’s US dollarsAccording to a new report from cryptocurrency investment firm Keyrock, a focus that researchers say carries risks that the industry has largely ignored.
One stablecoin to rule them all
Reliance on a single issuer’s infrastructure, regulatory status, and reserve management creates a systemic exposure that no one in the space discusses publicly, said Keyrock researcher Ben Harvey, writing in collaboration with Coinbase and Tempo.
A regulatory challenge against Circle, a delinking event, or even a prolonged service outage would leave the agent economy without an alternative settlement option. Harvey said the risks deserve serious attention as transaction volumes continue to grow.
In one year, automated payments have evolved from concept to live ecosystem, with agents settling 176 million transactions.
We searched with @CoinbaseDev, @tempoAnd it is distinguished @virtuals_io It analyzes the evolution of the payment stack, how the economy works, and what stands in the way. pic.twitter.com/W6DGGYAUC0
– Keyrock 🔑🪨 (@keyrock) May 21, 2026
The numbers behind the report are staggering. From May 2025 to April 2026, AI clients settled more than $70 million 176 million transactions The average transaction size is about 31 cents.
This number alone explains why traditional payment networks have never worked here. Standard processing fees of about 30 cents per transaction make anything under a dollar completely unviable on rails designed for consumer credit cards. An agent that pays three cents to call the weather API can’t go through Visa.
Why did traditional bars leave behind?
Stablecoins have filled this gap not because they were chosen, but because there is nothing else that can do the job. The economics of legacy payments infrastructure simply collapse at sub-dollar volumes, and crypto pipelines carry no fixed per-transaction fees that would eat up the full value of a small transaction.
By the end of Q1 2026, more than 104,000 agents have been registered across 15 or more directories and registries worldwide.
Harvey described the transformation as going from concept to developed ecosystem in just 12 months. Incumbents seem to have taken notice – the report says more than $8 billion has been deployed in acquisitions by established players looking to gain a position in what is emerging as a new payment stack built on autonomous software rather than human users.
Image: ManageEngine Insights
A market built on one foundation
AI agents are already being used to build Web3 applications, launch tokens, trade, and interact autonomously with protocols and services.
And Queen Gekko reconnaissance Of the 2,632 cryptocurrency users surveyed last April, 87% were willing to let AI agents manage at least 10% of their cryptocurrency portfolio.
Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle, predicts that billions of stablecoin agents will be working on behalf of users within five years.
Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView
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