A study published this week by crypto investment firm Keyrock, run with Coinbase and the Tempo blockchain, put real numbers on the agent economy for the first time: $73 million settled across 176 million machine-to-machine transactions between May 2025 and April 2026. Over 104,000 registered agents across 15+ directories. Average transaction size: about $0.31.
And one more number, the one that should stop you: roughly 98% of those settlements moved through a single company's stablecoin.
Keyrock's own researcher put the risk plainly: if that one issuer faces a regulatory challenge, a de-peg event, or even sustained downtime, the agent economy has no fallback.
That is not a decentralized economy. That is an economy with a single load-bearing middleman.
The pattern nobody is naming
