BroadChain News, April 27, 10:06 AM – The market has been chasing AI tokens for three years, but the cryptocurrency actually used by AI agents may surprise most people. Projects with "AI" in their names, such as FET, TAO, and RENDER, are not actually adopted by AI agents running on the network. A real AI agent can initiate hundreds of payments per second, and the credit card model of 2.9% plus a $0.30 fixed fee simply cannot support this; it requires sub-second settlement, while ACH wire transfers still operate in three-day increments. All assets claiming to be AI tokens are completely absent from the real AI economy.
In 2025, Coinbase, in collaboration with Circle and Google, activated the long-dormant HTTP 402 status code. The x402 protocol allows AI agents to complete USDC payments within two seconds without needing to register an account, obtain an API key, or undergo manual confirmation. Circle's 2026 data shows that over 98% of agent-driven payments chose USDC, with an average transaction amount of just $0.31—an amount that humans would rarely initiate on their own, and only machines would conduct such micro-transactions.
Circle also launched the Arc blockchain, specifically designed for stablecoin finance, with a transaction cost of approximately $0.01 per transaction. By aggregating transactions off-chain and settling on-chain in batches, the cost of USDC transfers can be reduced to $0.00001. In comparison, the fixed fee for credit cards is nearly 100 times higher than the total cost of a single machine payment. The stablecoin track not only addresses the reduction of on-chain costs but also transforms value transfer between machines from "infeasible" to "feasible." USDC has evolved from a stablecoin into a protocol primitive for machine-to-internet communication, standing alongside TCP/IP and HTTP.