North America logged $3.02 trillion in crypto economic activity in the 12 months ending July 1, 2026, which kept the region in first place as the world’s biggest force in crypto, according to the North America section of Chainalysis’ 2026 Geography of Crypto report. The report zeroes in on three shifts: AI agent commerce is no longer just a test case, dollar stablecoins are scaling as a way to export digital dollars, and Canada has become the most active peer-to-peer crypto economy in the G7.
$3.02 trillion regionally, with the U.S. and Canada leading the big-money ranking
Chainalysis said the U.S. and Canada ranked first and second in its Big-Money Index, which scores countries by raw crypto economic weight. Combined, they were responsible for $3.02 trillion in activity, just 1.9% lower than the previous period. The U.S. accounted for $2.78 trillion of that figure, down 2.2% year over year, while Canada grew 2.3% to $247.7 billion.
Chainalysis said the mild regional dip mostly came from a small pullback in U.S. market size. Even in a rough market cycle, the U.S. held on to most of the gains it built during the 2025 bull market. The firm pointed to spot Bitcoin ETF rollouts for institutions, quicker adoption of tokenized real-world assets, and wider use of compliant stablecoins as the main reasons.
Hoolie Tejwani, head of Coinbase Ventures, said: "Compared with 2025, everything we are witnessing today is, at its core, a much deeper maturation of the industry. The foundational building blocks put in place in 2025 are now, in 2026, fully transforming into hard-core products with real active users, real liquidity, and real commercial markets."
Put simply, the point is that the industry went from building blocks in 2025 to actual products in 2026 with real users, real liquidity, and real markets.
The U.S. leads on-chain AI commerce as x402 transactions on Base pass 138 million
Chainalysis calls AI agent commerce one of the three core business lines incubated under U.S. leadership. Autonomous software agents are now paying directly on-chain for compute and services. And the U.S. has become the main place where that network is being built. The report specifically points to Circle, the issuer of USDC, and Coinbase, which incubated the x402 protocol.
Will Su, head of digital asset research at BlackRock, said the firm is watching the sector closely because "AI agents have the potential to spark massive real demand around the world for always-on, 24/7, high-frequency micropayments." In English, his point was that AI agents could drive large-scale real demand for nonstop, high-frequency micropayments worldwide.
By the end of the 2026 period, cumulative x402 transactions on Base had topped 138 million. Chainalysis said on-chain settlement made micropayments possible in a way card rails simply cannot support economically. In traditional card systems, payments under $1, especially those below $0.01, usually do not even cover network costs. On stablecoin rails, where settlement costs sit well below one cent per transaction, machine-to-machine payments start to make sense.
Circle described the setup in blunt terms: card networks are for larger consumer payments initiated by people, while stablecoin rails are for millisecond-level automated settlement between machines when the amounts are too tiny for cards.
Over the 16 months through September 2026, more than 87% of x402 transaction values landed between 0.01 cents and 10 cents. The densest range was 1 cent to 10 cents.
Wallet refill rates climbed, while time to first use dropped from 73 days to 18 minutes
The report says agentic commerce is still early. But wallet behavior has changed fast. Early users would often fund a wallet once, try the service, and then disappear when the balance hit zero. That is fading.
Among wallets first funded in the third quarter of 2025, 70.6% got a second top-up within 30 days. For wallets first funded in the second quarter of 2026, that refill rate climbed to 89.3%. Chainalysis treats a second top-up after a wallet has been depleted as evidence that the user decided to keep using the service after the first billing cycle.
The delay between first funding and the first x402 payment also shrank dramatically. At the end of 2025, the median gap was 73 days. By the third quarter of 2026, it was down to 18 minutes. Fast. The share of wallets making a call within one hour of funding rose from 4% a year earlier to 67%.
U.S. wallets dominate paid model inference, while China-linked wallets cluster in code security
Tejwani said: "AI agents are evolving into fully independent economic actors, and each agent is essentially a brand-new real user on blockchain networks."
Chainalysis said agent spending has drifted away from early speculative token activity and toward information-heavy professional services. On-chain micropayments now go mainly to code auditing, financial intelligence, and data and search APIs. One of the biggest spending buckets inside x402 is model inference. Bots paying other bots. That is the picture.
In agent-to-services transactions that can be assigned geographically, the U.S. held a 30% global share. In base model inference payments, U.S. wallets made up 88.1% of network activity. They also captured 41.8% in agent frameworks and tool directories, and 23.2% in data and search APIs.
China-linked wallets looked very different. In security and code analysis, 90% of incoming funds came from wallets tied to China, and much of that went to AgentLISA, a service that uses large models to audit smart contracts. Chinese teams held a 46.7% share in market intelligence and a 35% share in settlement rails, but just 0.1% in paid model inference.
Chainalysis tied that gap to local AI economics. Open-source models like DeepSeek and Qwen are widely deployed inside China for free, while U.S. frontier closed-source models such as ChatGPT and Claude charge by token. So paid inference demand is much more concentrated in Western markets, while security auditing and arbitrage tooling are spread more widely.
The report also says high-frequency machine transactions with tiny values put pressure on traditional anti-money-laundering processes built around reviewing individual payments. In Chainalysis’ view, compliance systems will need to pay more attention to who deploys agents, how wallets are funded, the reputation of API recipients, and unusual behavior patterns.
The U.S. imports Bitcoin while exporting digital dollars through stablecoins
Chainalysis said that after the U.S. Congress passed the GENIUS Act in mid-2025, dollar stablecoins became a legally recognized route for exporting digital dollars. Over the past year, U.S. crypto flows split in two directions: the country exported dollar stablecoins around the world while also buying and holding large amounts of Bitcoin at home.
Since spot Bitcoin ETFs were approved in early 2024, the U.S. share of global Bitcoin flows has kept rising. Stablecoins, on the other hand, have made up a smaller slice of domestic U.S. crypto activity even as their use outside the U.S. has surged.
Will Su said: "At a time when government debt and fiscal deficits across society have reached record highs, global investors are showing unprecedented interest in Bitcoin as an alternative to sovereign currency." In English, he was saying that interest in Bitcoin as an alternative to sovereign currency has risen sharply as government debt and fiscal deficits hit record highs.
Chainalysis said 2026 was the first year since 2022 in which the U.S. became a net cross-border importer of Bitcoin. Retail transfers below $10,000 kept moving outward, but institutional transfers above $10 million continued flowing back into the U.S. Those eight-figure inflows alone added up to 53,200 BTC. The report’s description is pretty clear: retail money moved out, while institutions consolidated inside the U.S.
On stablecoins, 99.1% of all order-book trading across the market was pegged to the U.S. dollar. Circle said USDC circulation hit $73.3 billion at quarter-end, up 19% year over year, with more than $14.8 trillion in on-chain settlement volume during the quarter. Chainalysis said stablecoins now function as the core liquidity routing layer between global financial assets and sovereign currencies. By contrast, euro stablecoins still made up only 0.45% of volume despite Europe’s MiCA framework.
Tokenized U.S. Treasuries made up 42.8% of the RWA market, with offshore holders driving balances
The same concentration shows up in tokenized real-world assets. Chainalysis said tokenized U.S. Treasuries reached $15.42 billion on-chain, equal to 42.8% of total RWA value. By the end of the second quarter, the full RWA market had grown to $36.07 billion, up 135% across cycles.
Corporate credit rose 3156% and private equity climbed 1340%, but in raw dollar terms their gains were still only in the hundreds of millions to low billions. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries were a different story. They jumped from $6.86 billion to $15.42 billion, a larger increase than the combined gains of the next three RWA subsegments.
Holder geography was striking too. By value, Italy ranked first with 29.9% of tokenized U.S. Treasury holdings, followed by Portugal at 18.8%, Singapore at 18.2%, and the U.S. at 10.5%. By number of holders, Japan ranked first at 16.4%, though it represented only 0.4% of value. Chainalysis said that pattern suggests a small group of wealthy offshore entities holds most balances, while large numbers of retail investors abroad are steadily putting in smaller amounts.
Securitize said: "The end state is not to build an isolated crypto system running in parallel with traditional finance, but to thoroughly rebuild the entire financial network using better blockchain technology."
Canada grew to $247.7 billion as immigration helped drive P2P usage and remittances
Canada took a different route. Chainalysis said the country’s crypto economy grew 2.3% to $247.7 billion. It ranked 10th on the global grassroots adoption index and came first among G7 countries in overall P2P activity. It also ranked seventh worldwide in both domestic and cross-border flow measures.
Stablecoins accounted for 44% of crypto purchases by Canadian users, up from 30% a year earlier. USDC made up most of that demand.
Chainalysis links the rise in Canadian P2P and cross-border flows to the country’s large immigrant population. About 23% of residents were born outside Canada, the highest share in the G7. Using World Bank data, the report said traditional bank remittances from Canada carry average fees of 6.7% to above 7%, while on-chain stablecoin transfers cost less than one cent.
Personal cross-border remittances from Canada to India, the Philippines, and China totaled $2.36 billion during the period, up 141% year over year. Those transfers were spread across 3.56 million transactions, with an average of 75,100 unique monthly remitters and an average transfer size of $663.
Canadian P2P volumes tracked temporary resident populations
The report also found that local Canadian P2P crypto activity closely tracked the number of temporary residence visa holders, especially international students and foreign workers. When those populations increased, P2P activity rose. When immigration quotas tightened, volumes eased.
Chainalysis said paying rent in Bitcoin and covering bills with tokens has become part of daily life in some Canadian communities.
The report’s broader view: the U.S. builds the rails, global users bring demand
Across the region, Chainalysis casts 2026 as a year of global specialization. U.S. institutions, issuers, and developers control the core infrastructure in three categories: tokenized U.S. Treasuries, dollar stablecoins, and x402-based AI agent commerce. But the users creating repeated real-world demand are increasingly outside the U.S.
Canada stands out as an example of digital dollars being used to make remittances cheaper. Investors in Europe and Asia are using stablecoins to buy tokenized U.S. Treasuries. Developers across the world are calling U.S. AI models through Base. The report also says the European Union’s MiCA rules, Singapore’s stablecoin framework, and Brazil’s digital real efforts are attempts to build local alternatives, but dollar liquidity still keeps the currency in the default on-chain role.
As compliance around agent finance and tokenization gets deeper, Chainalysis expects this structure, with the U.S. building the infrastructure and the rest of the world plugging into it, to keep shaping global finance in the years ahead.