TL;DR:
- Stablecoins processed nearly $390 billion in real payments during 2025, double the previous year, according to McKinsey.
- Base concentrates between 5% and 6% of USDC supply, around $4.7 billion in stablecoins, and WalletConnect moved more than $2.5 billion through Base in Q1 2026 alone.
- The x402 protocol, backed by Coinbase, Google, Microsoft, Visa and Mastercard, allows AI agents to make autonomous micropayments in USDC on Base without human intervention.
The global transaction volume of stablecoins reached $46 trillion in 2025, nearly triple the annual volume of Visa, according to the a16z State of Crypto report. This figure positions stablecoins as functional money and shifts the discussion toward which infrastructure sustains it. In that scenario, the network operating as the foundation for onchain payments at scale becomes the de facto standard.
Base, the layer-2 network built on Ethereum and developed by Coinbase, has been steadily consolidating that position. In mid-2024, Coinbase and Base announced an integration with Shopify to bring USDC to millions of merchants. Shopify chose Base for its cost, speed and security profile. When the world’s largest e-commerce platform makes that decision, the rest of the market must respond.
Base and Stablecoin Payments
The other half of the story involves buyers that are not human. Artificial intelligence agents are increasingly carrying out real transactions: API calls, subscriptions, agent-to-agent services. The traditional payments system was not designed for this. The x402 protocol, launched by Coinbase in May 2025, solves the problem using HTTP status code 402. An agent contacts an endpoint, receives payment instructions, signs a stablecoin micropayment in USDC and completes the transaction within the same request cycle, without human intervention.
Since then, Cloudflare, Coinbase and Stripe founded the x402 Foundation, later joined by Google, Microsoft, AWS, American Express, Mastercard, Visa and Shopify. The protocol has accumulated 173 million transactions and more than $51 million in volume. The majority of payments settle on Base.
Eric Brown, AI Lead at Base, summarized it as follows: “Base has always aimed to be the home of payments. We’re seeing how x402 and a new wave of agent-driven projects are expanding the ecosystem. Base is becoming the home of agentic commerce.”
WalletConnect: the Foundational Connection Layer
Beneath Base and x402 operates WalletConnect Pay, the wallet infrastructure layer that underpins both dynamics. The WalletConnect network moved more than $400 billion in transaction volume during 2025. 72% of the payment volume on its network corresponds to stablecoins. It integrates more than 700 wallets, all major chains and half a million users, through a single connection.
For payment service providers, WalletConnect Pay functions as a standard alternative payment method: no per-chain routing logic, no custom integrations. In January 2026, Ingenico, the world’s largest point-of-sale terminal provider, integrated WalletConnect Pay, extending that infrastructure to millions of physical terminals across 32 countries.
