Research · x402 · Base · Read October 4 2026 06:30 UTC
Who pays for x402 on Base?
A few wallets make the calls. The dollars mostly come from wallets making 100 calls or fewer.
A few wallets make the calls. The money comes from everyone else.
The study's six days show paid calls, dollars, paying wallets and wallets over 1,000 paid calls each. On every UTC day from September 28 through October 3 2026, 6 to 13 heavy wallets made 31.2% to 51.9% of calls and paid 0.3% to 5.3% of dollars. Wallets at 100 calls or fewer made 17.8% to 36.7% of calls and paid 77.1% to 99.1% of dollars.
| UTC day | Calls | Dollars | Paying wallets | Heavy wallets | Heavy calls | Heavy dollars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 28 | 68,657 | $60,575 | 5,351 | 11 | 51.9% | 0.3% |
| Sep 29 | 79,272 | $8,617 | 3,010 | 12 | 47.5% | 2.3% |
| Sep 30 | 66,512 | $42,889 | 2,844 | 12 | 46.7% | 0.5% |
| Oct 1 | 51,912 | $10,912 | 5,310 | 6 | 31.7% | 1.8% |
| Oct 2 | 50,410 | $3,590 | 2,550 | 8 | 31.2% | 2.1% |
| Oct 3 | 69,361 | $3,793 | 2,248 | 13 | 41.4% | 5.3% |
Stream coverage: Coinbase, UltravioletaDAO and OpenFacilitator. Other facilitators were 0.2% to 13% of calls a day in the study (about 13% on October 3, when Fluxa had about twenty times its usual volume). Batch-settled payments, about 7%, are not in this stream.
Ten to 23 wallets carried half of each day.
Calls were concentrated before the heavy-wallet cutoff. On September 28, 10 wallets carried half of the day's calls. On October 2, 23 did. Across the six complete UTC days, the range was 10 to 23 wallets.
| UTC day | Wallets for 50% of calls |
|---|---|
| Sep 28 | 10 |
| Sep 29 | 15 |
| Sep 30 | 15 |
| Oct 1 | 22 |
| Oct 2 | 23 |
| Oct 3 | 20 |
The daily cohorts look scheduled.
Two cohorts, 319 wallets paying 0x159b...4908 exactly $0.1000 and 214 wallets paying 0x5aae...482e exactly $0.2500, paid once a day on all six days and paid nothing else. Together they were 533 wallets, about 20% of a quiet day's payers. That reads as one operator's schedule, not broad demand.
October 1 changed the payer median.
On October 1 2026, 2,264 wallets that never paid before or after each paid one service, 0x8a12...0881, once. The payments ran from $0.5100 to $3, $4,770 in all. They were 43% of that day's payers and moved the payer-balanced median from about $0.0100 to $0.2500. The sampled $WAGE barely saw them because a one-call wallet enters the sample about 1 time in 16.
Why a count of calls is easy to move.
x402 exact payments are signed transfers submitted by a facilitator. The facilitator pays gas. A payer can pay a wallet it controls. That makes a loop of tiny self-controlled payments cheap, which is why Tickerz prints the heavy-wallet share beside $GIGS.
Method and caveats
- Six complete UTC days, September 28 to October 3 2026, from the Goldsky stream in machine_payments on Base.
- The daily table is the study's six days, read from the same daily x402 table as Index Machina on October 4 2026 and fixed here; the live days continue there.
- A wallet is not a person. Heavy and cohort shares are floors for one operator's footprint.
- Nothing here says who ran the cohorts or the October 1 burst, or that they meant to move an index. They are patterns in public payments.
- The stream misses facilitators outside Coinbase, UltravioletaDAO and OpenFacilitator, and misses batch-settled payments.
- This is a measurement of payment rows. It is not advice.
Corrections
No corrections yet. First published October 4, 2026.