Summary
- North America’s $3 trillion crypto economy remained the most influential in the world, with advancements in agentic commerce, exports of dollar stablecoins, and tokenization shaping global activity.
- The U.S. crypto economy shrank 2.2% in the 2026 period (in line with bear market expectations) while the Canadian crypto economy bucked the trend, growing 2.3%.
- Agentic commerce, or AI agents using crypto to pay autonomously, grew rapidly over the 12-month period, with U.S. providing a nexus for growth.
- Canada is the G7’s most robust peer-to-peer crypto economy, potentially driven by its large immigrant population. Cross-border stablecoin remittances to India, China, and the Philippines reached $2.36 billion this period, up 141% year-over-year.
North America was the most influential region for crypto markets globally in the 12 months ending July 1, 2026 (our 2026 reporting period). With the United States’ deep investor base providing the capital, lawmakers updating regulations, stablecoins providing a currency, and businesses bringing crypto ever-closer to traditional finance, what happens in North America’s crypto industry gets exported to the world. Indeed, the U.S. and Canada topped our “big-money index,” an unweighted measurement of the sheer crypto-economic power of the countries we cover. In the 2026 period, their respective crypto economies totaled $3.02 trillion, a modest 1.9% drop from the period before.
The regional contraction stems from a slowdown in the U.S. The United States’ $2.78 trillion crypto economy fell by 2.2% period-over-period, an unsurprising outcome in the context of a brutal bear market. Still, the world’s single-biggest crypto economy largely retained in 2026 the near-doubling it posted for the 2025 period. Institutional forces such as the rise of crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs), accelerating tokenization and the proliferation of stablecoins helped it retain those gains.
“A lot of what we’re seeing vs. 2025 comes down to maturation of the industry,” said Hoolie Tejwani, Head of Coinbase Ventures. “The building blocks set in 2025 are turning into products with real users, liquidity, and markets in 2026.”
In this chapter we’ll look at a trio of U.S.-developed crypto products attracting major activity in-country and around the world: AI commerce, stablecoins, and tokenized assets. All three are manifestations of the U.S. influence on the global crypto market.
We’ll also examine the Canadian market, which, while far smaller than its southern neighbor, resisted the downtrend: Canada’s crypto economy rose 2.3% in the 2026 period. Focusing on a subset of that $250 billion economy, we will explain how Canada’s immigrant populations affect its surprisingly strong peer-to-peer economy.
The US is leading the AI on-chain economy
The United States’ lead in the global AI development race is influencing all corners of the economy, including crypto. We researched x402, one of the most popular digital payments rails that lets AI agents spend money, to better understand how this economy is taking shape.
Autonomous software has begun to pay for things on-chain, and the United States has emerged as its dominant builder. Crypto’s cornerstone American companies, including Circle, the issuer of USDC (a leading currency for agents), and Coinbase, builder of the x402 system itself, are supporting their rise. We spoke to both companies for this report to get a sense of the technology. Agentic commerce is also drawing interest from the U.S.’ most important financial institutions. BlackRock’s Head of Digital Assets Research Will Su told us the firm is watching agentic commerce closely “with AI agents potentially creating meaningful demand for frequent, low-value payments around the clock.”
By the end of the 2026 period over 138 million x402 transactions had occurred on Base, the most popular blockchain for agentic commerce.
On-chain payments allow for economic activity infeasible on traditional payment rails, such as micro-payments. Transactions worth less than a dollar (and especially less than a penny) don’t make fiscal sense for a credit card network to process. But stablecoins that themselves cost less than a cent to settle make it economically viable for agents to spend tiny amounts of money. This possibility opens up a whole new market of pay-as-you-go goods and services, such as a data pull through an API call.
Circle describes a clean division of labor emerging: “card rails for consumer-prompted agent payments, stablecoin rails for machine-to-machine settlements that are too small for card economics.”
Indeed, the vast majority of x402 activity registered as a micropayment in the 16 months ending in September 2026 (we extended our review period given how new this technology is). Over 87% of payments fall between a hundredth of a cent and a dime, with the most common size between one and ten cents.
While agentic commerce is still in its “experimentation phase” (as multiple experts we spoke to put it), we’re noting signs of maturation. The earliest days of x402 were marked by one-off users trying something out (like making a crypto trade) but then leaving as soon as they ran out of funds. That dynamic seems to be shifting.
AI payments are becoming stickier
Each successive group of wallets has arrived more committed than the last. Grouping wallets by the quarter they were first funded, the share that got a second funding within 30 days of the first rose from 70.6% for wallets first funded in Q3 2025 to 89.3% for those first funded in Q2 2026, the most recent group whose 30-day window has fully closed. Topping up a depleted wallet is the on-chain equivalent of renewing a subscription after the first invoice lands. We counted only wallets that sent on two or more separate days, to exclude the one-and-done experimenters and focus on the wallets actually using agentic payments in an enduring way. These numbers show that users are increasingly finding enough utility in x402 to keep funding their wallets after their balances are depleted.
Users of x402 are also becoming more purposeful. We can discern this by looking at the decreasing gap in time between a wallet’s seed funding and its first x402 spend. In late 2025 (when the protocol was still new) wallets were, at the median, 73 days old when they initiated an x402 payment; by Q3 2026 that gap had dropped to 18 minutes. This temporal compression shows that these newer wallets are being purpose built to engage in agentic commerce and to spend on x402.
Since launch, the share of wallets spending on x402 within their first hour of being funded has climbed. In Q3 2025, just 4% of wallets made their first payment within an hour of funding. By Q3 2026, that figure had jumped to 67%, meaning roughly two in three new wallets are now spending almost immediately after being topped up. That is another strong signal of purposeful adoption. People are not funding wallets to park value or test the protocol; they are funding them because a specific job is already queued up and the money needs to move.
What AI agents are buying with x402
“AI agents are becoming economic actors where every agent is effectively a new ‘user’ of the blockchain,” said Tejwani of Coinbase Ventures. “We’re especially excited about projects building on the x402 protocol, which Coinbase incubated, and what it means for the future of open-sourced standards and internet-native payments.”
All the data on agentic payments had us asking: what are AI models actually buying on-chain? In the early days of x402 the answer was predominately fads; memecoins such as PING attracted huge numbers of new wallets only to fade. But the maturation of x402 has also produced more enduring forms of agentic commerce, especially in the information sector. The robots are buying AI-generated knowledge on-chain.
We’ve tracked millions of transactions flowing from AI wallets into information-focused services like code review, financial intelligence, and data and search API. This tracks with what we know about agents in general: they’re hungry for machine-readable data. It’s an area where on-chain micro-payments can be especially useful, as we discussed earlier.
AI agents are also paying through payment rails, for gaming, token issuance and gambling services, and for agent frameworks and agentic tooling. Notably, the AI agents are also paying for AI agents. One of the largest categories for x402 transactions is model inference.
The U.S. dominates in AI-to-AI commerce
American-funded AI agents are transacting more with x402 services than agents funded from any other country. The U.S. holds a 30% share of the agent-to-services transactions that we can geolocate (using the same methodology we apply to other on-chain activity).
American wallets account for 88.1% of all geolocated AI model inference transactions on the protocol, 41.8% of payments to agent frameworks and tool catalogs, and 23.2% of payments to data and search APIs — the three categories that supply the inputs to building agentic software.
To compare, Chinese-attributed wallets were most prominent in the security space. Nine out of ten transactions we tracked going into “Security and code analysis” originated from Chinese-linked wallets. Almost all of this activity flowed into AgentLISA, a service that audits Solidity smart contracts using a language model. They were also prominent customers of market and financial intelligence, with 46.7% share, and payment and settlement rails, with 35% share. But Chinese-funded AI agents took just 0.1% of model inference. Chinese operators are scarce only in paying for inference.
One possible explanation is AI nationalism. The Chinese market is perhaps more readily accepting of Chinese-developed models, led by DeepSeek and Qwen, than the American market is. This AI nationalism intersects with economic reality. China’s open-weight models are free to use; US-developed, metered models, led by ChatGPT and Claude, are not.
The implication is that the visible market for machine-bought intelligence will be largest in jurisdictions where buying it remains the cheapest option, and American demand sits at the center of that market today. The experimental phase appears to be ending faster than many observers assume. Recapitalization cadences and funding-to-spend intervals, describe a provisioned system with a recurring budget line, not a demonstration.
The monitoring surface is unlike anything in conventional payments. Individual transactions are too fast, too small, and too frequent to serve as the compliance checkpoint. But the model offers different controls: the funding event identifies the sender, the budget authorization is a reviewable human decision, the receiving service is a known counterparty, and the mechanical regularity of agent spending makes behavioral anomalies easier to detect than in human-driven payment flows. The compliance logic shifts from screening each payment to screening the setup, the destination, and the pattern.
Accountability must trace to whoever deployed and funded the agent, not the agent itself. The reviewable checkpoints are the funding event, the counterparty, and the behavioral pattern. Those three can operate at machine speed. Per-transaction review cannot. Frameworks that do not account for this will either block agentic commerce entirely or miss it completely.
The US is importing digital gold and exporting digital dollars
Congressional passage of the GENIUS act in mid-2025 formalized what crypto economies around the world already know: the U.S. is the leading exporter of digital dollars. Stablecoins have turned US debt into a currency-of-choice for peer-to-peer economies as well as businesses working across borders. In the 2026 period we continued to see stablecoins enter new use cases most especially abroad, benefitting the U.S. companies, and the U.S. government, with billions of dollars in economic activity.
While the U.S. has been exporting stablecoins, it has also been importing bitcoin. Since the January 2024 launch of the spot bitcoin ETFs, the U.S. share of global bitcoin activity has consistently risen through every reporting period. Meanwhile, stablecoins make up a smaller share of American crypto activity than of activity elsewhere, and the gap has widened each period Indeed, the chart below shows this trend. It pools three measures (bitcoin’s share of service inflows, of exchange trading and of net cross-border receipts) into a single index, so the distance between the lines, not their height, is the finding. The divergence shows the growing US dominance in Bitcoin and the rest of the world becoming increasingly dependent on USD stablecoins.
A dollar stablecoin is a way to hold dollars without an American bank account, and Americans already have one. The rest of the world is pivoting to a digital dollar because it meets a need that American users don’t share. Meanwhile, Americans are leaning harder on bitcoin as an infinitely scarce store of value. “Investor interest in bitcoin as a monetary alternative remains strong, particularly as government debt and spending reach new highs globally,” says Will Su, Managing Director and Head of Digital Assets Research at BlackRock.
Counting all cross-border bitcoin flows into and out of the US, the country became a net importer in 2026 for the first time since 2022. Transfers under $10,000 ran net outbound every period measured. But larger denomination transfers flip to net inflows, with the bracket above $10 million alone accounting for 53,200 coins arriving. Retail sends bitcoin out; institutions bring it in. A federal Strategic Bitcoin Reserve has added implicit sovereign demand to the private bid, even without an explicit buying program.
99.1% of stablecoin order book volume traded is pegged to the dollar, and tokens leave American issuers without touching a correspondent bank or appearing in any payments statistics. They also come back as demand. Every token is a claim on reserves held largely in short-dated US government debt. Circle reported $73.3 billion of USDC in circulation at quarter end, up 19% year on year, against $14.8 trillion of on-chain volume for the quarter alone. “More institutions now use stablecoins as the routing layer between fiat, local stablecoins, and global dollar liquidity,” Circle told us. “The mechanism that moves a position between assets, jurisdictions, or venues, not the position itself.”
Both trends benefit the U.S. market. The imported bitcoin is accumulated; the exported stablecoins help proliferate the dollar, bolstering U.S. economic strength.
These two legs differ in durability. Bitcoin accumulation is an institutional allocation decision that moves with the market’s changing proclivities. As Blackrock’s Su explained, “the first half of 2026 saw ETP outflows as AI attracted capital away from digital assets. Inflows resumed in the third quarter as the AI investment theme moderated.” Comparatively, stablecoin proliferation is broad and incremental; users who adopt digital dollars are unlikely to turn away.
Order book data underscores the challenge any competing stablecoin has in unseating the dollar. Despite the implementation of EU laws such as MiCA that created a more favorable landscape for euro-backed stablecoin issuers, those assets account for just 0.45% of orderbook volume. Still, more competitors are gathering; Singapore and Hong Kong have both introduced stablecoin licensing frameworks designed to support locally denominated offerings. All face the same gap: regulatory readiness has outpaced market adoption. User demand is not yet there.
The US impact on tokenization
The United States continued to dominate the fast-growing tokenization sector in the 2026 period. For one, U.S. debt (Treasury bonds) were the single-largest real-world asset (RWA) in the period with $15.42 billion on-chain: 42.8% of all tokenized RWA value. The tokenization market overall finished Q2 2026 with $36.07 billion, posting 135% growth period-over-period.
“We are seeing asset managers launch tokenized funds, public companies explore putting their equity on-chain, financial institutions build stablecoin infrastructure and tokenized assets become usable within lending, collateral and trading markets,” said Tom Murphy, head of communications for Securitize.
As tokenized assets broadly become more useful on-chain, the types of assets being tokenized have expanded. Corporate credit grew 3,156% and private equity 1,340%, but those gains moved categories from tens of millions to a couple of billion. Treasury debt’s 125% growth is a move from $6.86 billion to $15.42 billion, more than the next three categories combined in dollar terms. The market is diversifying around US government debt rather than away from it.
US holders are 11.7% of the global tokenized RWA holder base and account for 11.4% of its value, a near match. Tokenized Treasuries break that symmetry decisively. By value, Italy accounts for 29.9% of geolocated tokenized Treasury holdings, Portugal 18.8%, and Singapore 18.2%, against 10.5% for the United States in fourth place. By share of holders the ranking rearranges almost entirely: Japan leads with 16.4% of holders but just 0.4% of the value. The distance between the two measures is the finding. A small base of large foreign holders is driving the tokenized Treasury market, while a broader retail base is accumulating smaller positions.
The policy reading is the one Morva Rohani of the Canadian Web3 Council draws for stablecoins later in this chapter, and it transfers directly: a holder outside the United States who buys a tokenized Treasury product is creating demand for US government debt rather than for their own government’s. Tokenization lowers the minimum position size and removes the need for a US brokerage relationship, which turns a wholesale instrument into one a retail holder in Lisbon or Singapore can buy directly.
Lending patterns reinforce the point that tokenized Treasuries are being bought and held rather than put to work as collateral. Wallets lending private credit grew 1,618% over the period, and private credit now accounts for 77% of all value lent against tokenized RWAs. Commodities lending grew 875%. Treasuries went the other way, contracting 23%, the only category to do so. The divergence is consistent with what tokenization does for each asset. Private credit is illiquid in its untokenized form, so a tokenized position that can be posted as collateral is worth more to its holder than the underlying loan. Treasuries are already the most liquid collateral in conventional finance; a holder who wants cash against them has established ways to get it.
Securitize also frames what adoption will come to mean: “Over time, investors may care less about whether they are ‘using crypto’ and more about whether their financial assets can take advantage of the speed, programmability and global interoperability that blockchain infrastructure can provide.”
“The end state is not a separate crypto financial system sitting alongside traditional finance,” Securitize told us. “It is increasingly one financial system using better technology.” That convergence extends beyond the public-chain data captured here. A parallel institutional tokenization layer continues to build on permissioned infrastructure like Canton, where regulated participants settle tokenized securities and cash in environments designed around existing custody and compliance frameworks. That activity does not show up in on-chain holder counts, but it suggests the full tokenization story is larger than any single dataset captures.
Canada is a global leader in peer-to-peer
Canada, the second largest country in our “big money index” and 10th in our grassroots adoption index overall, saw its crypto economy grow 2.3% between July 2025 and June 2026 (the 2026 period) to reach $247.7 billion overall.
Inside this modest growth story are residents using crypto for their everyday lives. And they’re doing so at rates far higher than we normally see in highly developed economies. In fact, among G7 nations Canada had the most robust overall peer-to-peer crypto economy in our 2026 rankings; it placed seventh globally in both domestic and cross border flows.
Stablecoins, a highly popular asset for peer-to-peer commerce globally, feed the largest share of Canada’s crypto appetite. By June 2026 stablecoins took 44% of Canadian dollar-based order book volume, up from 30% a year earlier. USDC is the dominant stablecoin within this bucket; very little trading activity flowed to Canadian dollar-backed stablecoins.
This purchasing dynamic creates a somewhat undesirable setup for Canada: the country’s most in-demand cryptocurrency is essentially a stablecoin denominated in USD, so a foreign asset. As we mentioned above with regard to purchasing tokenized U.S. Treasuries, buying U.S. dollar stablecoins creates demand for U.S. government debt at the expense of potential demand for Canadian government debt, according to Morva Rohani, Executive Director of the Canadian Web3 Council.
“This is a trend that Canadian policy-makers are following closely,” she said.
Canada’s proximity to the US sharpens the point, but the dynamic applies globally. Any value flowing into U.S. treasury-backed stablecoins, instead of local debt-backed alternatives, weakens demand for local sovereign debt. The global strength of the U.S. dollar makes this more likely, but no less problematic, and Canadians are not the only ones looking to reduce the dollar dominance of stablecoin volumes.
Canada recently adopted a stablecoin act that will clear the way for issuers to launch Canadian Dollar stablecoins. Some of those prospective issuers are specifically targeting the domestic and international payments as use cases, according to Rohani. But their CAD stablecoins are thus far minuscule in market cap and overall adoption compared to their USD counterparts.
Canada’s cross-border crypto economy
Canada’s embrace of stablecoins plays into another important crypto story that we track: its cross-border flows. Canada is first in the world in cross-border flows in our unweighted “big money” index, the complement to the grassroots index, where Canada ranks seventh.
One important factor in Canada’s surprising cross-border strength is likely its thriving immigrant population. “About 23% of Canada’s population is foreign-born, the highest share in the G7,” said Rohani. She credits Canada’s large immigrant population as one of the key drivers of remittances; we will discuss another area of strength for immigrants (peer-to-peer economy) later in the report.
“Remittance corridors to India, the Philippines, Nigeria, Pakistan, and China are heavily used,” Rohani said.
Canada’s remittance strength tracks a specific financial profile: residents who need to move money across borders regularly and face high costs doing so through traditional channels. Many in this group maintain financial obligations in their country of origin, whether supporting family, servicing debt, or managing assets. Conventional remittance fees make those obligations expensive. Stablecoin remittances make them cheaper.
We looked at three of those countries with the fastest cross-border growth — India, China, and the Philippines — which together account for 19.4% of Canada’s outbound cross-border stablecoin value, up from 10.9% a year earlier.
Remittance-sized stablecoin and bitcoin transfers from Canada to India, the Philippines and China totaled $2.36 billion this period (up 141% YoY). This activity spread across 3.56 million transactions with an average of 75,100 unique senders per month throughout the period. Their average transfer size was $663.
These corridors are huge before crypto enters the picture. Global remittances hit about $905 billion in 2024, and Canada’s top destinations lead the recipient table: India ranks first worldwide at roughly $129 billion, China draws about $48 billion, and the Philippines about $40 billion. Canadians sent an estimated $8.3 billion abroad in 2023, much of it to those same three countries. Against that total, the $2.36 billion we measured on crypto rails is a small but fast-growing slice.
Cost explains why that slice keeps growing. The World Bank pegs the average cost of sending money from Canada near 6.7%, with banks above 7%. A stablecoin transfer settles for a cent or less, whatever the amount, and those savings add up across the many payments a regular sender makes each year.
The population behind Canada’s domestic volume
Globally, peer-to-peer crypto payments often make the most sense for immigrants; they may have limited access to traditional financial tools like bank accounts, and therefore a need for a viable alternative. These populations may find crypto especially useful in conducting their daily business.
Ebbs and flows within that population track with patterns we saw in Canada’s P2P activity. For example, we looked at data on study permit holders from China, India, and the Philippines, (three of Canada’s most popular remittance corridors) since mid-2021. As this group swelled, so too did Canada’s domestic peer-to-peer crypto economy. Then, as policy changes began to cut the number of permits issued, and reduce the number of permits held, activity shrank.
The correlation shows up in the data. Canada’s domestic P2P crypto volume has tracked closely with the size of its population holding temporary visas, rising and falling in parallel since mid-2021. The relationship is associational, not causal, but the direction is consistent in both expansion and contraction. The likeliest explanation is straightforward: people with active cross-border financial lives are more likely to adopt a cheaper settlement option when one exists.
While these trends are only associational, domestic peer-to-peer crypto volumes tracking the trend in temporary visas both up and down is highly suggestive. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that Canadians are using crypto as part of their daily lives. We’ve heard stories of landlords accepting rent payments in bitcoin, of residents paying their bills in crypto, and even of small businesses accepting payments for their goods.
The infrastructure layer is American; the user base is global
North America’s story this period is less about who holds crypto and more about who builds the rails that others use. American institutions, issuers, and developers now sit at the center of three overlapping on-chain markets: the Treasuries being tokenized, the dollars being held in stablecoin form, and the AI services being bought agentically. In each case, the users driving demand are increasingly outside the United States, while the infrastructure monetizing that demand is inside it. Canada is one such user, with growth running outward through dollar-denominated rails that neither its banks nor its regulators control.
That concentration is not going uncontested. The EU’s MiCA framework now requires euro-denominated reserves for stablecoins marketed in Europe. Singapore’s stablecoin regulatory framework, finalized in 2023, is designed to make locally issued tokens viable. Brazil’s Drex pilot is testing a central-bank-backed digital real on programmable rails. Each is an explicit attempt to build domestic alternatives to dollar-denominated infrastructure. Whether those efforts gain traction or simply confirm the dollar default will depend on adoption, not legislation alone.
The regulatory decisions ahead, from the Canadian Stablecoin Act to pending US guidance on tokenization and agentic payments, will set the terms for how large that gap between builders and users becomes in the period to come.
FAQs
How large is North America’s crypto economy in 2026?
North America received $3.02 trillion in on-chain value during the 2026 reporting period, down slightly from $3.08 trillion the year before. The United States remains the region’s dominant market and ranks near the top of Chainalysis’s global adoption index.
What is x402 and why does it matter?
x402 is an on-chain payment protocol published by Coinbase in May 2025 that lets AI agents and other autonomous software pay for things without human involvement at the moment of purchase. It enables a class of micro-transactions, typically between a hundredth of a cent and a dime, that traditional card networks cannot process profitably.
Which country leads AI-to-AI payments on-chain?
The United States, by a wide margin. American wallets account for 88% of all AI model inference payments on x402 and dominate the categories most closely tied to building agentic software.
Do Americans use stablecoins less than the rest of the world?
Relative to their overall crypto activity, yes. Stablecoins take a smaller share of US crypto activity than of activity elsewhere, and that gap widened in the 2026 period. Americans already have dollars through their banking system. Users in other markets are turning to dollar stablecoins to meet a need their local banks don’t address.
How large is the tokenized real-world asset (RWA) market in North America?
The global tokenized RWA market reached $36.07 billion in 2026, up 135% year-over-year. Tokenized US Treasury debt is the single largest category at $15.42 billion, with most of the value held by retail investors outside the United States.
Why does Canada have such a strong peer-to-peer crypto economy?
Canada has the highest foreign-born population share in the G7, and much of its peer-to-peer activity is tied to cross-border remittances. Stablecoin transfers from Canada to India, China, and the Philippines alone reached $2.36 billion this period.
What regulatory developments are shaping North American crypto in 2026?
Canada’s Stablecoin Act received Royal Assent in March 2026, with implementing regulations now being drafted. In the US, pending guidance on tokenization and agentic payments will shape how institutional and AI-driven on-chain activity scales from here.
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