News May 25, 2026
3 min read
AI Agents Settled $73 Million in 12 Months, and Traditional Payment Rails Can't Keep Up
Keyrock's 'Who Pays the Agent' report documents $73 million settled across 176 million autonomous AI agent transactions since May 2025. The critical finding: 76% of those transactions fall below the $0.30 minimum fee charged by card networks, making Visa and Mastercard economically unviable for machine-to-machine payments. Four competing payment architectures from Coinbase, Stripe, Google, and Visa are assembling into a layered stack, with over $8 billion in acquisitions already deployed to stake positions.