Analysis: x402 protocol's average daily trading volume is only $28,000, and the demand for delegated payments has not yet caught up with the narrative hype

PANews March 11 news, according to CoinDesk, the AI payment protocol x402, supported by a certain exchange and others, aims to enable automatic payments between AI agents and software by embedding small stablecoin payments into the internet communication layer. Although the narrative around the "agent economy" continues to heat up, on-chain data shows that the protocol is still in the experimental stage. Artemis analysis shows that x402 currently processes only about $28,000 in daily transaction volume, with an average payment of about $0.20 per transaction, and about half of the transactions are "self-trading" or "wash trading" activities, rather than genuine commercial behavior. Although there was a peak of 3.8 million transactions and about $2 million in a single day in February, this was mainly due to infrastructure testing and experimental use. The entire ecosystem is valued at about $7 billions, most of which comes from Chainlink's LINK token, rather than x402's native assets.

Supporters believe that x402 aims to solve the problem of small, high-frequency machine-to-machine payments that traditional payment systems struggle to handle, but real commercial applications still need time. Analysts point out that the development speed of the agent economy may be overestimated in the next year, but its potential may be underestimated five years from now.