Author: Chainalysis Team
Compiled by: Shenchao TechFlow
Shenchao Introduction: As the world's most dominant crypto market, North America settled a staggering $3.02 trillion in on-chain economic volume over the past year. The North America edition of Chainalysis's latest "2026 Global Crypto Geography Report" reveals three profound paradigm shifts: AI agent autonomous commerce, represented by the x402 protocol, is rapidly crossing the experimental phase, with the United States firmly occupying the core with an 88.1% share of model inference; in terms of macro capital flows, the United States is exhibiting a two-way scissors gap of "large net imports of Bitcoin and massive global exports of digital dollars"; at the same time, Canada, buoyed by its large immigrant base, has jumped to become the G7's largest P2P economy, with annual remittance volume surging 141%. The full report uses detailed on-chain data to present a panoramic picture of "the United States building the underlying infrastructure while the world absorbs real demand."
Core Report Summary
1. Regional Dominance: In the rolling 12 months ending July 1, 2026, North America, with a total crypto economic value of $3.02 trillion, continued to hold its position as the world's most influential crypto hub, with its breakthroughs in agentic commerce, dollar stablecoin exports, and real-world asset tokenization (RWA) profoundly shaping the global landscape.
2. Divergent U.S.-Canada Performance: The U.S. crypto economy reached $2.78 trillion, a modest year-over-year decline of 2.2% (fully in line with cyclical adjustment expectations); while Canada's crypto economy expanded against the trend by 2.3%, with its total exceeding $247.7 billion.
3. Agentic Commerce Explosion: The business model in which AI agents use crypto rails for autonomous payments is experiencing explosive growth, with the United States providing the core technological construction hub in this wave.
4. Canada Leads G7 in P2P: Driven by the rigid demand of its large immigrant population, Canada has become the strongest peer-to-peer (P2P) crypto economy in the Group of Seven (G7). Stablecoin cross-border remittances to countries such as India, China, and the Philippines reached $2.36 billion in the current period, surging 141% year-over-year.
North America Crypto Economy Panorama: $3 Trillion Scale and Institutionalized Resilience
In the 12-month statistical period ending July 1, 2026, North America remained the undisputed bellwether of the global crypto asset market. The United States' deep pool of institutional investors supplied abundant capital, regulators gradually streamlined rules, stablecoins provided a native circulating currency, and traditional financial giants are integrating crypto infrastructure into the mainstream at unprecedented depth. In Chainalysis's "Big-Money Index," which measures each country's absolute crypto strength, the United States and Canada unsurprisingly took the top spots. Together, they generated a total crypto economic volume of $3.02 trillion, a slight retraction of only 1.9% from the previous period.
This slight decline was mainly due to a modest adjustment in the size of the U.S. market. As the world's single largest crypto market, the United States' $2.78 trillion volume demonstrated astonishing resilience amid a severe market cycle, almost fully preserving the massive gains from the near-doubling during the 2025 bull market cycle. The institutionalized launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs, the accelerated advancement of RWA tokenization, and the large-scale penetration of compliant stablecoins built an unbreakable floor of support.
Chart: Evolution of North America's crypto economy size by statistical period. The 2026 period's overall size reached $3.02 trillion.
Hoolie Tejwani, head of Coinbase Ventures, noted: "Compared with 2025, what we are witnessing today is essentially the industry's deep maturation. The foundational building blocks laid in 2025 are fully transforming in 2026 into hardcore products with real active users, real liquidity, and real commercial markets."
This report deeply deconstructs the three pillar businesses incubated under U.S. leadership: AI commerce, dollar stablecoins, and tokenized assets; at the same time, it focuses on the Canadian market, revealing how its immigrant population has spawned a highly vibrant peer-to-peer cross-border financial system.
The United States Leads the On-Chain AI Economy: The Rise of Agent Micropayments
The United States' absolute leading advantage in the AI R&D track is spilling over comprehensively and reshaping the underlying ecosystem of cryptocurrency. Autonomously operating software agents have already begun paying directly on blockchain to purchase computing power and services, and the United States has become their most core architectural builder. Domestic core companies, including USDC issuer Circle and x402 protocol incubator Coinbase, are working together to build an agent financial network. Will Su, head of digital asset research at global top asset management giant BlackRock, explicitly stated that BlackRock is closely watching this track, and that "AI agents have the potential to stimulate enormous real demand worldwide for round-the-clock 7×24, high-frequency, micro-payments."
Statistics show that by the end of the 2026 period, on Base, the most mainstream public chain for agentic commerce, cumulative x402 protocol transactions had officially surpassed 138 million.
Chart: Growth curve of cumulative x402 protocol transactions on Base, breaking through the 138 million mark.
On-chain payments have fully activated micro-payments that traditional bank card clearing networks cannot handle. In the traditional credit card ecosystem, transactions below $1, especially below 1 cent, are completely unable to cover channel costs economically. However, in on-chain stablecoin networks where the per-transaction settlement cost is far below 1 cent, small micro-interactions between machines become entirely feasible, thus opening a new era of massive on-demand procurement of data and APIs.
Circle described this new ecosystem as a clear binary division of labor: "Traditional card network rails handle large-value consumer payments triggered by humans, while stablecoin rails specifically handle millisecond-level automated clearing between machines that is too small for card networks."
Over the 16-month long period ending September 2026, more than 87% of x402 transaction amounts fell between 0.01 cents and 10 cents, with the densest transaction amount range being 1 to 10 cents, showing extremely pure micropayment characteristics.
From Trial to High Stickiness: The Qualitative Inflection Point of the AI Payment Ecosystem
Although agentic commerce is still in an early exploratory stage, a series of on-chain indicators already clearly demonstrate its astonishing improvement in stickiness. In the early days of x402, most users were one-time trial users who left once their tokens ran out; now, this behavioral pattern has completely reversed.
We tracked cohorts of agent wallets by first funding time: among wallets first funded in Q3 2025, 70.6% received a second funding within 30 days; by the new wallet cohort in Q2 2026, this top-up ratio had climbed sharply to 89.3%. On-chain, recharging a wallet whose balance has run out is equivalent to a user choosing to actively renew a subscription after receiving the first bill. This indicates that more and more developers and institutions have found genuine essential value in the x402 protocol.
At the same time, the interval between wallet funding and usage has undergone sharp time compression. At the end of 2025, the median time from a wallet receiving initial funds to first initiating an x402 payment was as high as 73 days; by Q3 2026, this interval had plummeted to an astonishing 18 minutes.
Chart: Evolution of agentic commerce stickiness: the share of wallets initiating spending within 1 hour after first funding surged from 4% to 67%.
The share of wallets initiating calls within 1 hour after funding soared from only 4% a year earlier to 67% now. A full two-thirds of new wallets begin working the moment they are funded. People are no longer funding to hoard coins or wait and see, but to execute specific productive tasks already queued up.
What exactly are AI agents buying? Model inference and code auditing
Tejwani of Coinbase Ventures emphasized: "AI agents are evolving into fully independent economic actors, and each agent is essentially a brand-new 'real user' of the blockchain network." So where exactly are these bots spending their money on-chain?
In the early days, there was briefly a flood of speculative token hype, but as the ecosystem evolved, funds now flow almost entirely to information-intensive professional services. Millions of on-chain micropayments flow precisely to code auditing, financial intelligence, and data and search API interfaces. Agents are extremely hungry for machine-readable structured data.Most notably, robots are paying for robots: in the x402 protocol, one of the largest core expenditure categories is "Model Inference."
The China-U.S. Landscape of AI-to-AI Commerce: The U.S. Monopolizes Inference, China Goes Deep in Security
In geographically traceable Agent-to-services transactions, the United States ranks first globally with a 30% total share. In foundation model inference transactions, U.S. wallets command an overwhelming 88.1% share of the entire network, 41.8% in agent frameworks and tool directories, and 23.2% in data and search APIs, firmly building the underlying technology stack for agent software.
Chart: A horizontal comparison of transaction shares between the United States and the rest of the world across various AI commerce sub-sectors.
In stark contrast, agent wallets associated with China demonstrate extremely high dominance in the code security domain: of the funds flowing into "security and code analysis," a full nine-tenths (90%) come from China-related wallets, with most of those funds flowing to AgentLISA, a service that uses large models to audit smart contracts. In addition, Chinese teams hold a 46.7% share in market financial intelligence and a 35% share in settlement rails. But on the payment side for model inference, Chinese wallets account for a mere 0.1%.
This enormous disparity stems from AI localization ecosystems and economic realities: Chinese open-source models (such as DeepSeek and Qwen) are widely deployed locally for free in their home market, while U.S. frontier closed-source large models (ChatGPT, Claude) charge strictly by token. As a result, the market that requires real money to call inference is mainly driven by Europe and the United States, while security auditing and arbitrage tools flourish globally.
At the regulatory compliance level, the ultra-high frequency and tiny amounts of machine transactions have completely overturned the traditional per-transaction anti-money laundering risk control system. Compliance logic must shift from transaction-by-transaction screening to a comprehensive systemic overhaul covering agent deployers, funding injection events, API recipient reputation, and abnormal behavior pattern identification.
The Great Capital Divergence: The U.S. Imports Digital Gold, Exports Digital Dollars
Since the U.S. Congress passed the GENIUS Act in mid-2025, dollar stablecoins have formally become a globally legal digital dollar export channel. Over the past year, the United States has shown a distinct two-way flow characteristic: on one hand, it has aggressively exported dollar stablecoins to the world; on the other, it has itself been massively buying and locking up Bitcoin.
Since spot ETFs were approved in early 2024, the U.S. share of global Bitcoin flows has continued to climb. By contrast, the share of stablecoins in U.S. domestic crypto activity has gradually narrowed, while in international markets outside the United States, stablecoin usage has exploded geometrically.
Chart: Divergence indicator of Bitcoin and stablecoin usage intensity. The U.S. domestic market strengthens Bitcoin hoarding, while the overseas world fully embraces dollar stablecoins.
BlackRock's Will Su analyzed: "At a time when government debt and fiscal deficits across society have hit historic highs, global investors' interest in viewing Bitcoin as a sovereign currency alternative has never been stronger."
Statistics show that in 2026, the United States became a net cross-border importer of Bitcoin for the first time since 2022. Retail funds under $10,000 continued to flow overseas, but ultra-large institutional funds of more than $10 million per transaction continued to flow back from overseas to the United States, with large inflows at the tens-of-millions level alone accumulating 53,200 Bitcoin. This vividly confirms the pattern of "retail outflow, institutional accumulation." Even the potential expectation of a Federal Reserve strategic Bitcoin reserve adds an implicit sovereign credit endorsement on top of private institutional demand.
By contrast, for stablecoins, 99.1% of order book transactions across the entire network are anchored to the dollar. Circle reported that its USDC circulation reached $73.3 billion at quarter-end, up 19% year-over-year, with single-quarter on-chain settlement volume exceeding $14.8 trillion. Stablecoins have become the core liquidity routing layer for allocating between global financial assets and sovereign fiat currencies. Although Europe introduced MiCA in an attempt to support euro stablecoins, their transaction volume share is only a weak 0.45%. The dollar has indisputably inherited its absolute hegemony in traditional finance on-chain.
The Tokenized U.S. Treasury Suction Black Hole: Overseas Retail Funds Flow into U.S. Treasuries
In the tokenized real-world asset (RWA) track, the United States likewise occupies an absolutely dominant position. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries, with an on-chain scale of $15.42 billion, alone account for 42.8% of total RWA value across the entire network. Total network RWA scale surpassed $36.07 billion at the end of the second quarter, recording cross-cycle growth of 135%.
Chart: The expansion trajectory of total network tokenized RWA market value.
Although corporate credit (up 3,156%) and private equity (up 1,340%) grew astonishingly, their absolute increments were only in the range of hundreds of millions to low billions of dollars; tokenized U.S. Treasuries, however, jumped directly from $6.86 billion to $15.42 billion, with the increment from this single category surpassing the combined total of the next three sub-sectors.
Chart: Comparison of scale growth by major RWA asset sub-category, with tokenized U.S. Treasuries occupying an absolute half of the market.
An even more interesting phenomenon occurs in the geographic distribution of holders: measured by holdings value, Italy holds 29.9% of tokenized U.S. Treasuries, ranking first globally, Portugal accounts for 18.8%, Singapore 18.2%, while the United States itself ranks fourth with only 10.5%; but measured by number of holders, Japan ranks first with 16.4% of retail holders, yet its holdings value accounts for only 0.4%. This indicates that a small number of high-net-worth overseas entities contribute the bulk of the amount, while a massive number of overseas retail investors are actively making regular allocations.
Chart: Distribution of tokenized U.S. Treasury holdings scale and number of holders by country. Overseas capital has become a new main force absorbing U.S. Treasuries.
Tokenization has greatly lowered the threshold for investing in U.S. Treasuries, enabling ordinary residents in Lisbon or Singapore to buy with one click without opening a traditional U.S. brokerage account. Objectively, this technological evolution has converted global private capital into loyal buyers of U.S. Treasuries.
Tokenization service provider Securitize pointed out: "The endgame is not to build an isolated crypto system parallel to traditional finance, but to thoroughly reconstruct the entire financial network with superior blockchain technology."
Canada's Rise: An Immigration Wave Gives Birth to the G7's Largest P2P Crypto Hub
Within the entire North American bloc, Canada has demonstrated an extremely unique development path: its total crypto economy value climbed against the trend by 2.3% to $247.7 billion, ranking 10th globally in the grassroots adoption index, and it also claimed the crown for overall P2P activity among G7 developed countries, ranking seventh globally in both domestic and cross-border flows.
Chart: Chainalysis Global Crypto Adoption Composite Ranking: Canada ranks first in P2P adoption among G7 countries.
Among Canadian traders' purchasing preferences, stablecoins account for as much as 44% (a significant jump from 30% a year earlier), and the vast majority are dollar stablecoins, USDC.
Chart: Changes in the proportion of Canadian users purchasing various crypto assets. Stablecoins have become the largest primary asset.
The core driver behind Canada's explosive P2P and cross-border flows is precisely its enormous international immigrant population. About 23% of Canada's usual resident population was born outside the country, the highest proportion among G7 countries. Many residents face high cross-border remittance costs. World Bank data show that the average fee for traditional bank remittances from Canada is as high as 6.7% to over 7%, while on-chain stablecoin settlement costs less than 1 cent.
Statistics show that total personal cross-border remittances from Canada to India, the Philippines, and China reached $2.36 billion in this period, surging 141% year-over-year, distributed across 3.56 million transactions, with an average of 75,100 unique remitters per month and an average single remittance amount of $663. On-chain stablecoins are rapidly eroding traditional offline remittance corridors with an annual scale of tens of billions of dollars.
Chart: The scale of on-chain cross-border remittances from Canada to India, the Philippines, and China shows doubling explosive growth.
An even more intuitive data correlation is this: fluctuations in Canada's domestic P2P crypto trading volume show a highly synchronized resonance with the scale of the country's temporary resident visa holders (study permits and work permits). When the population of foreign students and workers grows, crypto P2P activity simultaneously spikes; when immigration quotas tighten, transaction scale falls accordingly. Landlords accepting Bitcoin for rent and residents using tokens to pay bills have become daily life in many Canadian communities.
Chart: Canada's domestic P2P crypto trading volume shows a significant positive correlation with the number of temporary resident visa holders in the country.
Grand Summary: The United States Builds the Ecosystem Foundation, the World Takes On the ApplicationsAcross the 2026 North American crypto landscape, the most profound essence lies in the "globalization of division of labor":
U.S. institutions, issuers, and developers firmly hold the infrastructure monopoly over the three core pillars on-chain: tokenized U.S. Treasuries, dollar stablecoins, and AI agent commerce driven by x402. The United States controls the standard-setting power for underlying protocols and the pricing power for financial assets.
However, the end users who truly use this infrastructure at high frequency and drive real transaction demand are increasingly distributed outside the country. Canada is a typical example of using digital dollars for low-cost cross-border remittances, ordinary investors in Europe and Asia are using stablecoins to snap up on-chain U.S. Treasuries, and developers worldwide are calling U.S. large-model agents through the Base chain.
Although the EU's MiCA, Singapore's stablecoin framework, and Brazil's digital real are actively exploring localized alternatives, the dollar network's powerful liquidity flywheel still firmly maintains its status as the global default currency. As agent finance and the tokenized compliance process deepen, this symbiotic pattern of "the United States building the infrastructure, the world integrating into the on-chain network" will profoundly reshape the new order of global finance in the coming years.