State of the x402 network

Dated reports measured from this directory's own instruments: continuous probes, real paid purchases, and public chain data. Each report has a stable URL, a machine-readable twin, and a stated basis for every figure. CC-BY-4.0.

Reports

What agents ask for. (live, rebuilt 2026-09-01) — the demand feed rendered for people: needs agents describe, services they check before paying, and searches that return nothing. Ranked by persistence across distinct days, not volume — rebuilt after we found the feed publishing catalogue enumeration, one seller's self-checks, and an IP count dressed as a client count (thirteenth correction). JSON: /v1/demand

Week of 30 Sep – 7 Oct: a payment label that said more than we knew (2026-10-07) — the outcome label paid_but_status_NNN was defined as payment accepted with USDC moved; of the 651 records we checked on Base, 127 had settled, 515 had not and 9 could not be checked (correction #26). Also a bug of ours in how payments were forwarded, and a probe pass rate we have not yet explained.

Week of 23 – 30 Sep: we refunded both outside buyers (2026-09-30) — the paid demand feed read about half the 30-day window it claimed (correction #24), so both purchases by other buyers were refunded on chain; corrections #23 and #25; two bugs in our own buyer; a regroup that briefly duplicated needs, and a wrongly stated cause corrected; the x402 working group’s draft verifier object and signed attestations on our verdict.

Week of 16 – 23 Sep: stable endpoints delivered 90 of 90 (2026-09-23) — 185 endpoints paid; every one of the 90 bought before that took payment delivered again; 36 of 45 changed listings never reached payment; the five non-deliveries all charged before validating input; 61 wrongly-failed records corrected by appended signed records; correction #22; a five-hour timeout window explained.

Week of 9 – 16 Sep: a change on the record beat every other predictor (2026-09-16) — 168 endpoints re-bought; of the 20 that still looked healthy but had changed, 11 delivered and 9 did not; correction #19 (429 counted as failure, 620 failing verdicts were our own request rate) with the worked example as a CSV; every paid-verification outcome now defined; a verified badge on a burn address.

Week of 2 – 9 Sep: the catalogue tripled and found three of our rules wrong. (2026-09-09) — 3,325 routes imported on independent-buyer evidence; corrections #15–#17; “126 new listings, one was real”; the economy line at twice the addresses and the same money, then its two best days; the verdict route’s four days at the toll gate (two sales, both ours); 89.6% agreement with Paddock on 376 paid calls and what the other 10% is; 30 spellings for the network key across 1,271 manifests; one of twenty, not twenty; a peer’s scan that found a hole in our changes feed. JSON: /state/week-2026-09-09.json

Week of 26 Aug – 2 Sep: the failures we caused, the purchases we refused. (2026-09-02) — 512 false “failing” verdicts from our own resolver, a seller stuck on a retired token 310 times, one listing with 1,036 payment-address resets, header-vs-body network lists recounted (186/36/2), the demand feed after removing ourselves, wave 6 (776 endpoints, 233 purchases refused, first refund-on-failure observed), and the 31 POST-only listings we wrongly read as dead. Five corrections. JSON: /state/week-2026-09-02.json

The ledger: what actually gets paid on x402. (2026-08-30) — our own index of every USDC payment on Base to every listed seller, 30 days: 7.5M payments, $670k gross, 11,044 paying wallets; x402-signed payments told apart from everything else (~$250k). One seller's 1.2M/day peak and 99% cliff; the median seller's $0.95. JSON: /state/the-ledger.json

The 400 you didn't pay for. (2026-08-28) — anatomy of the paid-then-rejected failure class: 97 of 99 had published their contract in the challenge; 96 never took the money. Chain-audited, twice self-corrected. JSON: /state/the-400-you-paid-for.json

We paid 550 x402 endpoints. Here's what came back. (2026-08-25) — a $5.40, 1,333-purchase census of paid delivery across the network: who charges, who delivers, who takes the money and refuses service. JSON: /state/paid-verification.json

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