Stablecoinis s are officially money; the question is how to spend them
For most of the last decade, stablecoins were a crypto-native asset that were used for crypto-native use cases. Users would trade in and out of tokens and move money between exchanges. This scenario is long gone. In 2025, stablecoins handled roughly $390 billion in actual payments, roughly double the prior year, according to McKinsey.Total stablecoin transaction volume, including financial flows, reached $46 trillion in 2025, nearly three times Visa's annual volume, according to a16z's State of Crypto report.
Once that becomes true, a different question takes over. If stablecoins are money, which chain is the rails behind it? The moment commerce starts moving onchain at scale, a chain becomes the default.
Base is proving to be a strong candidate. An Ethereum L2 built by Coinbase, Base designed for cheap, fast transactions, and it's where the many credible commerce integrations have actually shipped – including our very own merch stand at WalletCon.
What follows is a look at three pieces of the same story: how Base is integrating payments into its roadmap, starting with how Base is enabling AI agents that pay for things autonomously and then diving into how WalletConnect powers both use cases by operating the network behind payments.
Why Base is the chain that payments are landing on
Mid last year, Coinbase and Base announced a partnership with Shopify to bring USDC to their millions of merchants and customers. Shopify picked Base for cost, speed, and a security profile they were willing to put their merchants behind. When the largest commerce platform on the internet makes that call, it sets a reference point every other platform now has to react to.
The stablecoin numbers tell the same story from a different angle. Base holds somewhere in the range of 5-6% of the global USDC supply, and the share is still rising. Base has a stablecoin supply of $4.725 billion with over $4.2 billion in USDC.
Any wallet that uses WalletConnect can transact on Base today, without any additional friction. 72% of payment volume across the WalletConnect Network is in stablecoins, with $2.5B+ via Base in Q1 2026 alone. WalletConnect Pay's first live deployment with Moneda was on Base, highlighting how the connectivity layer and the chain are aligned at the implementation level, not just on slide decks.
In 2025, stablecoin transaction volume cleared $46 trillion, more than Visa moved in the same year. Base is in line to carry a meaningful slice of that as commerce migrates onchain.
Base x AI agents: when the buyer isn't human
The Shopify story is about human buyers moving onchain. The other half of the story is buyers who aren't human.
AI agents are starting to do real work, and a lot of that work involves paying for things: compute, API calls, data, subscriptions, services from other agents. The existing payments stack wasn't built for this. Card payments assume there is a person on the other end managing: an account, a billing address, a 3DS challenge. Even API-key billing assumes a developer sets it up ahead of time. None of that scales to an agent that needs to make a $0.002 call, and move on.
The protocol pulling this together is x402. It uses HTTP 402, which is the "Payment Required" status code. An agent hits an endpoint, gets a 402 request back with payment instructions, signs a USDC micropayment, and retries. Done in the same request cycle, no human in the loop, no API key.
Coinbase released this in May 2025. Since then, Cloudflare, Coinbase and Stripe started the x402 Foundation, joined by Google, Microsoft, AWS, Amex, Mastercard, Visa, and Shopify. Most settlements happen on Base. 173.53 million transactions, and over $51.16 million USD equivalent going through x402
The marketplace layer is filling in alongside it. Coinbase launched Agentic.market, where agents discover and pay for services using x402, no API keys, no preset accounts. Agents get wallets and "skills", which are small bundles of code that describe how to use a given service. Once agents have access to both skills and services via Agentic.market, they can earn and spend autonomously, with USDC on Base as the settlement layer underneath.
Google went a step further with AP2, an agent-to-payments standard that talks to x402. MetaMask, Mesh, and the Ethereum Foundation are involved.
Eric Brown, AI Lead at Base, frames it directly: "Base has always aimed to be the home for payments. Our goal is to consistently provide the best tools for builders and consumers. And now, we're seeing the ecosystem grow further with the adoption of x402 and a wave of new agent-driven projects and tools. Base is becoming the home of agentic commerce. We are excited to expand our platform to serve an even larger audience: agents."
There's a wallet question buried in all of this. Every agent that pays for things needs a wallet, and that wallet has to connect to services across chains without somebody hand-rolling integrations each time. That's the work WalletConnect has been doing for years for human users, and it's the same work agentic commerce now needs at a different scale. WalletConnect Pay already handles programmable, agent-initiated flows, not just human-initiated ones, which matters more as more of the volume stops involving people.
WalletConnect: the wallet infrastructure for Base, Shopify, and x402
WalletConnect Pay isn't competing with Base or x402. It's the wallet layer they all sit on top of.
WalletConnect is already part of the Shopify integration, handling wallet connection and value transfer. The numbers are large enough to be worth stating plainly: 500 million users, 700+ wallets, every major chain, one integration. In 2025 the WalletConnect Network moved more than $400 billion in transaction volume. When Shopify picks Base and x402 agents settle on Base and USDC is the asset doing the work, the question on the wallet side becomes 'which wallets can actually connect and settle?' – the practical answer is "whichever ones powered by WalletConnect." MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Ledger, Binance Wallet, OKX, Robinhood, and Fireblocks all do.
For payment service providers (PSPs) and acquirers, WalletConnect Pay is shaped like an Alternative Payment Method (APM), not like a crypto integration. One integration, multi-chain, multi-wallet, no per-chain routing logic, no custom UX. From the merchant side, it behaves like any other payment method they'd add through their PSP, which is the only way crypto checkout ever scales inside companies that don't otherwise touch crypto.
Chain coverage matters specifically for the Shopify x Base case. Base is supported, but so are Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Arbitrum, and the rest of the EVM stack. A merchant using WalletConnect Pay automatically supports whichever wallet their buyer happens to be carrying, regardless of which chain that wallet is connected to.
Compliance is part of the integration rather than something the PSP has to assemble afterwards. Travel Rule-aligned flows, clear payment states, predictable settlement, and no extra compliance lift on the PSP side. That's not the exciting part of the pitch, but it's the part that decides whether something gets turned on at scale or stays in pilot.
In January 2026, Ingenico, the largest POS provider in the world, integrated WalletConnect Pay. Same infrastructure, now reaching physical retail across millions of terminals in 32 countries.
The Next 12 Months
There's a conversation happening right now over which infrastructure powers commerce onchain, and the early contenders are visible.
x402 makes agentic commerce look like a 2026 problem rather than a 2030 one. The protocols are live, the wallets exist, settlement works, and the backers are credible. The shift won't show up as a single launch; it'll show up as a steady increase in machine-to-machine volume that compounds quietly across quarters.
Stablecoin supply is heading toward $3 trillion by 2030 if you take the US Treasury's projection at face value. Whoever owns the wallet connectivity layer through that growth is sitting on the rails that everything else depends on.
WalletConnect Pay's position is straightforward: one integration, half a billion users, every major chain, PSP-shaped, compliance-ready. As Base becomes the default for commerce onchain, WalletConnect Pay is how wallets — human or otherwise — actually connect to it.
Looking ahead
Commerce is moving onchain, and Base is where it's landing first. Shopify proved that for merchants. x402 is proving it for agents. The wallet layer underneath isn’t partial to whoever is paying – whether it’s a person tapping at checkout or an agent finishing a task at machine speed, it's the same connection problem, and WalletConnect Pay is already solving it.