Cardano Is Now Part of the AI Agent Economy. Does That Make ADA a Buy?

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Key takeaways

Cardano integrated with the x402 payment standard created by Coinbase.
Competitors like Base and Solana handle tens of millions more agent payments.
Declining network transaction fees indicate limited financial upside for ADA holders.

Cardano is now equipped to participate in the artificial intelligence agent economy in crypto. In September, it became part of the official software development kit for x402, which is a new payment standard created by Coinbase and intended for use mostly by AI agents.

After the coin's decline of 71% over the last 12 months, it's clear that its holders are craving a fresh narrative to attract more capital. But, at least so far, Cardano is still not worth buying, as it hasn't proven that joining the x402 ecosystem has any actual upside for its investors.

Competitors are already settling tens of millions of payments from agents

x402 is a protocol that enables software agents to pay for web services or information on the web without needing a credit card or needing to sign up for any accounts. It's an emerging application for blockchain technology.

As of Sept. 23, the tracker Agent Economy reported just over 85 million x402 payments on the Base chain, Coinbase's network, and 66.9 million on Solana, making those two the most utilized. Cardano has so far only recorded 38,777 transactions on its homegrown effort called Masumi, which was launched in November 2024. That sum is up from 29,000 transactions in May, so it's getting a little bit more traction this year, but still not much compared to its rivals.

Furthermore, the Cardano Foundation's x402 payment processor service had not yet been run on Cardano's main network as of Sept. 30, per its main code repository. So Cardano's own agent network is live, but the piece connecting it to the wider x402 ecosystem isn't.

Would handling more agent payments even help Cardano holders

The bigger problem here is that holders wouldn't see much benefit if Cardano's agentic payments ecosystem really took off.

Suppose Cardano won every x402 payment ever made. That would be worth $41.8 million in stablecoins, per Agent Economy, or just a sliver of Cardano's $9.2 billion market value as of Sept. 30.

And payment volume isn't the same as holder income; holders benefit mainly when x402 users need the coin to pay transaction fees. On that front, Cardano collected just $39,380 in network transaction fees this August, down from $312,207 a year prior, per data from DefiLlama. Some of that drop reflects the coin's lower price, since fees are paid in ADA, but fees measured in ADA still fell by nearly half.

Therefore, even a breakout in agent payments would do little for holders unless it lifted Cardano's shrinking fee base, and there's no sign of that yet. But if it can someday offer a compelling reason for agents to use its solutions instead of other options, that could eventually change.

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