Xdc Says Ai Agents Could Upend Invoices And Card Payments

What Happened

Stripe launched the Machine Payments Protocol, or MPP, in March. The open standard allows agents and services to coordinate micropayments and recurring payments programmatically, with Stripe supporting stablecoins as well as traditional payment methods;

Mastercard’s Agent Pay for Machines service, announced in June, is designed for continuous, high-frequency and low-value payments, with settlement across cards, accounts and stablecoins. More than 30 companies, including Stripe, Coinbase, Cloudflare and Tempo, were named among its initial supporters.

XDC’s contribution to this market is XDCAI.tech, which uses the open x402 protocol originally introduced by Coinbase.

Coinbase introduced the protocol in May 2025, and its use has since expanded through integrations with companies including AWS.

XDC AI applies x402 to USDC settlement on XDC Network. Users fund a smart wallet with USDC and establish an on-chain spending limit. An agent can then pay an x402-enabled service per request. EIP-3009 allows the payment to be signed off-chain while a relayer covers the network fee, leaving the agent itself to hold and spend USDC.

Market Context

An estimated $390 billion in stablecoin payments took place in 2025, according to McKinsey and Artemis. But inside this market, AI agents are creating an interesting kind of payment activity.

Software can transact continuously. An AI service may need a weather feed for one calculation, a market-price API several seconds later, and compute resources immediately afterward.

Each interaction can carry its own price, turning what might once have been a monthly subscription or invoice into thousands of individual transactions.

Cloudflare entered the market in August with Cloudflare Wallets and cloudflare.pay, giving agents identities and programmable spending controls. Its payment tools support both x402 and MPP;

x402 turns the HTTP ‘402 Payment Required’ response into a payment mechanism. An agent requests a resource, receives its price, authorizes the payment, and repeats the request with proof of payment. The process allows software to purchase an API call or another digital service within the same interaction.

XDC lists two-second block times, six-second finality, and transaction costs around $0.00001, characteristics aimed at high-volume financial applications.

Why It Matters

Research shows that agents completed more than 176 million on-chain transactions worth over $73 million between May 2025 and April 2026. But most of them were very small transactions.

XDC Network believes this offers an early glimpse of how more payments could work in future.

Details

The median x402 payment was between $0.01 and $0.10, while 76% of transactions fell below the $0.30 fixed-fee threshold for card payments. USDC accounted for 98.6% of settlements.

Although the transaction amounts are small, the frequency of AI agentic payments is staggering — 173 million.

Software can buy data, compute and other services hundreds or thousands of times without the human behaviors that define conventional commerce. For example, opening an account, entering card details, approving an invoice or waiting until the next banking day.

“Money has always moved as fast as the slowest part of the process, like a bank, a clearinghouse, or normal business hours,” Atul Khekade, Co-Founder of XDC Network, told BeInCrypto. “Agents just show what happens when you get rid of those delays. Payments stop being something you wait around for and turn into a continuous process happening in the background at the speed of the underlying network.”

Machine Payments

That helps explain why Keyrock found activity spread across such a large population of AI agents and service directories. The report found more than 104,000 agents registered across at least 15 directories by the end of the first quarter of 2026.

The economics favor systems that can handle payments measured in cents or fractions of a cent. The payments industry is already preparing:

Google’s Agent Payments Protocol, or AP2, concentrates on proving user authorization and establishing an auditable record of what an agent was permitted to buy. Google transferred the protocol to the FIDO Alliance in April and added support for autonomous “Human Not Present” transactions;

Invisible Settlement

The system can also connect to AI applications through MCP or a command-line interface, allowing agents running through products including ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and Codex to discover and pay for services.

XDC already had much of the underlying settlement infrastructure in place. Native USDC and Circle’s CCTP went live on XDC in September 2025.