Visa's Sheffield Pegs Adjusted x402 Volume at $19M

Cuy Sheffield, Visa's head of crypto, said x402 has processed roughly $19 million across roughly 134 million transactions on an adjusted basis, according to a thread he posted Wednesday on X. x402 is a payments protocol for agent- and machine-initiated onchain transactions.

The figures come from a joint Visa and Artemis report, and are adjusted totals that exclude identified wash and test activity, based on Artemis Analytics onchain data as of April 21, 2026. The report notes that cumulative raw onchain totals are higher than the adjusted figures. Sheffield said the analysis was intended to answer "how much of this is actually real" by stripping out wash trading and test transactions before drawing conclusions.

Sheffield's thread put the adjusted totals at "~$19M across ~134M transactions since May 2025." An attached chart labeled "Cumulative x402 Volume (Adjusted)," powered by Artemis, shows cumulative volume rising to about $15 million by April 21 along an axis that begins around October, a lower figure and a different start point than the thread text states. Sheffield did not reconcile the two in the post.

Spending is heavily concentrated. The top 1% of x402 buyers, roughly 4,000 wallets, drive about 90% of adjusted volume and about half of all adjusted transactions, Sheffield wrote, while 422,000 wallets have paid for something onchain. Activity also concentrates by chain: he said Base accounts for roughly 90% of adjusted transactions and 93% of adjusted volume, with Solana second and Polygon third.

Sheffield also said MPP, a related protocol, has been live since March and is already averaging roughly 20,000 transactions a day. He did not define the protocol or its data source in the post.