- Key insight: Agentic payment volume has declined in 2026, following a spike in late 2025.
- What's at stake: Banks, payment companies and fintechs are heavily investing in the new form of AI.
- Forward look: Payment experts say established technology firms will have an advantage over startups in selling agentic AI.
While
Daily payment volume on
"The incremental lift to add agentic payments is low, and it will be a leap of faith for businesses to adopt this new tech from startups," Alex Witt, general partner at Verda Ventures, told American Banker.
What drove the decline?
X402, which is an open source rail, is one of about a
Data on agentic payments is imprecise and doesn't have a long history.
But the public AI agent technology that has been covered in the media has only been available for about two years. Witt said the decline in transactions is partly due to spoofing to demonstrate short-term demand and is less about agentic AI's long-term potential.
"It's very easy to manipulate or fake 'bot to bot' transactions. A firm can spring up a hundred bots, have them interact and then show that to an investor," Witt said.
A high percentage of x402 transactions in the December 2025 timeframe were artificial, created by wash trading and self dealing, according to Aaron McPherson, a principal at AFM Consulting. "What we are likely seeing here is a return to a more natural traffic level, although even now a substantial part of that is still likely synthetic," McPherson told American Banker. "A lot of companies are experimenting with the technology."
Despite the low volumes of agentic transactions, the number of agentic AI startups is high, according to Witt. There were 1,091 agentic AI companies in the first quarter of 2026, according to Tracxn, with 530 in the U.S., 177 in India and 66 in the U.K, with $24.2 billion in venture capital deployed globally.
Between August 2025 and September 2026, agentic AI startups received $3.67 billion in investment, according to
"There were hundreds of IPOs, but Amazon, Google and eBay are about the only major companies that you know from that time," Witt said.
There is a bubble for agentic commerce that's going to pop, according to Adrian Mendoza, general partner and founder of Mendoza Ventures.
"This is why we are not investing in this space. Having been in e-commerce for 15 years I am seeing the same scenario play out as it did when e-commerce shifted from desktop to mobile," Mendoza told American Banker.
Mendoza noted that in today's version of agentic commerce, large language models offer direct links to buy products. In the next phase, firms such as Shopify will offer direct API links, offering live payments and inventory data into those LLMs. "That bypasses all of these third party players, killing that agentic commerce market," Mendoza said. Not all payment experts think there is an agentic AI bubble.
If there were a bubble, you would not expect to see further investments in x402, according to McPherson. "However, Cloudflare, which launched the x402 Foundation along with Coinbase launched its Monetization Gateway in July, indicating substantial interest in x402, although it's too early to see significant volume from that," he said. The foundation behind x402 did not return a request for comment.
Where the opportunity is
Similar to Mendoza's view, Witt said the growth in agentic AI will come from existing companies that already have mature payment rails for human shopping and payments.
"A large payment firm could add a layer for agentic payments and capture the volume there," Witt said, noting the x402 protocols are open source. "There's no proprietary technology there that can prohibit others like fast-moving payment companies to use that." In the financial services industry, there are examples of mature legacy companies adding agentic commerce to their existing stacks. Capital One's $5 billion Brex acquisition secured Brex's portfolio of agentic AI tools that automate receipt collection, policy compliance reviews and back-office expense tasks. PayPal's purchase of Cymbio added Cymbio's product-detail page, which reformats merchant catalogs so AI agents can discover products and execute purchases.
Despite the appearance of a bubble, there will likely be room for specialist companies, according to Utkarsh Ahuja, managing partner and founder at Moon Pursuit Capital.
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"If AI agents become capable of researching products, comparing prices, negotiating terms and completing transactions on our behalf, you are potentially creating an entirely new layer of economic activity, and I think there will be room for both specialist startups and established fintechs to build very large businesses around that," Ahuja told American Banker.
That said, established fintechs clearly have an advantage in areas where the underlying infrastructure already exists, Ahuja said. "They have payment rails, merchant relationships, compliance systems, transaction data and distribution, so there is a very natural path for them to introduce agentic capabilities into products that millions of consumers and businesses already use. I would expect many of them to do that successfully."
