Agent Economy Report #1 · x402 on Base · Sep 28 to Oct 3 2026 (UTC)
$43,028 of $161,794 was real
Of 406,243 agent payments settled on Base in 6 days, 26.6% of the dollars were organic: one wallet paying another for a service. The rest was transfers, self-dealing rings and bot fleets.
Right now on Base
No x402 payment in the last four minutes of blocks. The next read is in 15 seconds.
Six days, split by what counted.
- Organic
- Transfers
- Self-dealing
- Fleets
Where the rest went
One-off transfers: $91,334. A payee paid by exactly one wallet that day, $100 or more in total. Sep 28 is one $50,000 payment; Sep 30 is one wallet sending $10,000, $8,000, $7,500, $6,700, $1,500 and $1,000 to six wallets that received nothing else.
Self-dealing: $25,525. About 98% of it every day is one ring of 16 to 23 wallets paying each other both ways in $20 to $50 payments, all settled through one router.
Single-purpose fleets: $1,907. A payee paid by more than 50 wallets that paid nobody else, at prices within one cent.
The daily table
| Day | Payments | Gross | Organic | Organic share | Transfers | Self-dealing | Fleets |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 28 | 71,698 | $65,609 | $9,066 | 13.8% | $51,809 | $4,449 | $284 |
| Sep 29 | 82,549 | $13,485 | $8,294 | 61.5% | $713 | $3,976 | $502 |
| Sep 30 | 67,880 | $48,100 | $7,844 | 16.3% | $35,448 | $4,440 | $367 |
| Oct 1 | 53,068 | $16,940 | $11,047 | 65.2% | $740 | $5,007 | $146 |
| Oct 2 | 51,313 | $9,256 | $3,226 | 34.9% | $1,873 | $3,956 | $201 |
| Oct 3 | 79,735 | $8,405 | $3,552 | 42.3% | $750 | $3,697 | $406 |
Method
x402 payments on Base settled by any listed facilitator, including router settlements (Goldsky census, replayed from Sep 28, read Oct 4 16:26 UTC). Circle Gateway batch settlements, other chains and other payment protocols are not in this release.
Rule: self-dealing, single-purpose fleets, one-payer transfers of $100 or more, and dust under $0.0001 are removed in that order; what remains is organic.
Prior work
Ling, Zhou, Wu, Wang, How Agentic Is Agentic Commerce? A Population-Scale Measurement of x402 Adoption and Authenticity, July 14, 2026. Over 280 days, 21.20% of x402 settlements on Base were fictitious and 63.78% internal to linked clusters.
Caveats
- A wallet is not a person or an agent; nothing on the chain says who holds it.
- The census replay finished on Oct 4; Oct 2 and Oct 3 were read after it finished.
- This is a first print. Later reads may differ; any revision will be published beside this one, never over it.
Proof
SHA-256
a5baeaae611f04db0d368b8e46a35815269089d2a9b219179739ffe2c0dbc4ee agent-economy-1.json (submitted 2026-10-04T18:49:46Z to a.pool and b.pool.opentimestamps.org)
The hash was submitted to OpenTimestamps calendars at publication and will be confirmed in a Bitcoin block.
Next release
October 11, 2026.