Solana leads AI agent payments in crypto, but the money involved is still tiny

Short answer: AI agents are starting to pay for data and services on their own, and Solana is the chain handling the most of it. On Nov. 1, Motley Fool analyst Alex Carchidi wrote that Solana is the best crypto for exposure to AI agent growth and that he plans to add to his position.

There is no single "deal" here. This is an opinion piece about a trend. The useful question is who pays, who gets paid, and how much money is really moving. The answer is: far less than the transaction counts suggest.

The numbers at a glance

What the Motley Fool piece argues

The case rests on a payment standard called x402. It lets websites charge agents small stablecoin sums for data or services, with no human approving each payment. Carchidi says that works best on a fast, cheap blockchain.

He credits Solana's Alpenglow upgrade for part of that. He says transactions now finalize within 150 milliseconds and usually cost under a penny. His headline stat is that Solana has settled 67.3 million (34.5%) of the 195.2 million payments initiated by AI agents as of Oct. 28.

Disclosure matters here. The article states that Carchidi holds Solana and that The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends it.

Who pays and who gains

Who pays: the owners of AI agents, whether individuals or companies, pay in stablecoins for each request. Ramp brought more than 70,000 business customers onto x402 agent wallets on Solana, so agents can spend USDC against corporate budgets without per-transaction sign-off.

Who gets paid: publishers and data sellers. Solana Compass says AWS CloudFront's x402 integration in June let publishers charge AI crawlers per request in USDC. Startup Fortune adds that Cloudflare is running a waitlist for a Monetization Gateway with a similar aim.

Who gains on the chain: Solana holders, in theory, through fees. Carchidi notes that half of each base fee is destroyed. But the amounts are small. By his estimate, base fees on those 67.3 million payments come to about $34,174. His comparison point is Solana's total chain fees of $62.9 million in the third quarter of 2026.

That gap is the real story. Agent payments are a rounding error in Solana's fee income today. The bet is on where they go next.

The sources do not agree on Solana's share

The Motley Fool puts Solana at 34.5% of agent payments. Other sources put it far higher. Solana Compass reported 76% of all x402 AI agent payment transactions in the four weeks ending Sept. 22, citing Artemis data shared by the official Solana account. CryptoBriefing said Solana accounted for roughly 70% of monthly x402 volume as of mid-August 2026.

These figures use different measures, time windows and, apparently, different payment universes. The Fool's number covers cumulative agent payments, and the others cover x402 over recent weeks. The Fool article does not say how it defines the 195.2 million total, so the numbers cannot be reconciled from the published material. Treat "leader" as solid and the exact share as uncertain.

Why the real volume is much smaller than it looks

Startup Fortune reports that trackers put x402 past 200 million transactions this year. It also reports that a Visa-Artemis analysis found adjusted volume of roughly $19 million once wash trading and self-dealing were removed. Forkast, it says, found that more than 95% of activity is protocol signals and micro-payments, with real daily settlement near $28,000. The average transaction is about 32 cents.

A commentary published by KuCoin on the 76% figure makes a similar point. It says transaction volume does not equal revenue and may include repeated calls and automated testing.

Why it matters for the AI market

The money is small, but the backers are not. Startup Fortune says the x402 Foundation, launched under the Linux Foundation, has about 40 members, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google, Microsoft, AWS and Cloudflare. Those firms are building metering and payment layers before the agent economy arrives.

Solana is also not the only chain in play. The same report says Coinbase built x402 on its Base network, and Base led daily x402 counts until Solana passed it on Jan. 20, 2026. The standard works across chains, so Solana's lead can be lost.

The risks to weigh

• Weak chain revenue. Motley Fool writer Lyle Daly notes that Solana network revenue was $141 million in the first half of 2026, down 87.1% from a year earlier, per 21Shares data. His view is that demand, not speed, is Solana's problem.
• Upgrades don't move price. Daly says Solana was down about 4% since Alpenglow went live on Oct. 21.
• Inflated activity. If most agent payments are noise, the growth story is thinner than it looks.

What to watch next

Watch two things. First, whether Solana's fee revenue turns up, which Daly calls a better signal than any upgrade. Second, whether independent audits of x402 volume move well above the roughly $19 million adjusted figure.

This article reports what analysts have said. It is not investment advice, and crypto prices are volatile.

Verdict: Solana is the clear front-runner for AI agent micropayments on current data. The revenue to justify a big thesis is not there yet.