The ledger: what actually gets paid on x402

2026-08-30. For a month this directory showed each seller's on-chain activity as a number that never went above 150. It turned out to be the size of a third party's page, not a count. So we built our own index of every USDC Transfer on Base to every listed payment address, daily, and then did the thing no published “stablecoin inflow” figure does: told x402 payments apart from everything else arriving at the same addresses. This is what the chain says.

Thirty days, all listed sellers, Base USDC

7,497,574 payments. $670,111. 11,044 distinct paying wallets. 308 payment addresses received something. Window: 2026-07-31 to 2026-08-30 UTC (today partial), every listing with an EVM payTo in its 402 challenge.

Two economies share the rail, and a single sum hides both. Payments per day peaked at 1,228,585 on Aug 17 and fell to 13,136 by Aug 24 — a 99% drop, all of it one seller. Dollars per day stayed flat, $15k–$37k every day of the month, because dollars are carried by a handful of sellers taking $100 tickets while counts are carried by compute sellers at a cent or two a call. The median paid address received 67 payments and $0.95 in the month. Six addresses received more than 10,000 payments; one received 95% of all of them.

Which of it is x402

USDC arriving at an address is not x402 revenue. Some listed sellers also take ordinary payments at the same address. The chain can tell: the x402 exact scheme settles as an EIP-3009 transferWithAuthorization submitted by a facilitator, and that function selector is in every transaction. We sampled the 25 most recent payments to each of the 308 addresses (6,425 transactions) and classified each as x402-signed (EIP-3009), plain transfer (a wallet sending money the ordinary way), or other (any other calldata — a batching facilitator, a smart-wallet execute, a bridge; we don't classify it).

By count, the economy is x402: 7,479,218 of 7,497,687 payments (99.75%) are x402-signed. 108 addresses are pure x402 in the sample; 18 have none; 182 are mixed.

By dollars, it isn't: about $250,000 of the $670,000 is x402-signed. About $392,000 arrives as plain transfers — nearly all of it at one gift-card merchant's payTo, where 22 of 25 sampled payments were ordinary checkout — and about $28,000 as other calldata. The dollar figures are sample-weighted estimates and are labelled as such on every listing; the counts are exact.

Named, because the chain already names them

blockrun.ai (10 listings, one payTo): 7,142,386 payments in the window, $166,968, 408 paying wallets, 25 of 25 sampled x402-signed. It ran at 100k–470k payments a day for three weeks, peaked at 1.2 million a day on Aug 17–18 — matching its own public “crossed a million a day” — and then fell 99% on Base from Aug 24 with its payTo unchanged. Base USDC only: whether that traffic moved chains or stopped is not something this index can say, and we don't. We showed it as 149.

api.bitrefill.com (6 listings): $435,419 over 3,792 payments from 2,709 wallets — the largest by dollars and by payer count, and mostly not x402-shaped (3 of 25). It is a gift-card merchant whose checkout address also answers 402s. Gross inflow, not x402 revenue; which is exactly the distinction this page exists to make.

api.nansen.ai (20 listings): 4,770 payments, $4,809, 181 wallets, 25 of 25 x402-signed. api.botpay.network: 24,549 payments from 3,804 wallets — the widest payer base on the network, at $1,688. stableenrich.dev: 58,245 payments, 429 wallets, $1,656. x402.twit.sh: 131,502 payments, 172 wallets, $1,077. laso.finance: $30,195 over 388 payments, 12 of 25 x402-signed. x402.clashofcoins.com: $19,494 over 830 payments, 0 of 25 x402-signed, all “other” — a contract we don't classify.

Every listing page now carries its address's daily series, its payment shape with the sample size, and how many listings share that address (figures belong to the address, not the route; never sum them across listings).

Against what's published

Every “stablecoin inflow to agents” figure we have seen is gross inflow to declared wallets, shape unknown, including ours until today. For comparison, one widely cited index reports $258,751 of inflow across six chains to 2,177 declared wallets over 30 days; on one chain, x402-signed only, listed sellers received about $250,000 — and 7.5 million payments against that index's 314,058. The difference is scope, not accounting: that index finds wallets through agent cards, and x402 sellers mostly don't have agent cards. Their number and ours measure different populations; ours also says which payments are x402.

Method, and what we can't see

Source: eth_getLogs on Base for USDC Transfer events whose recipient is a listed payTo, via a Coinbase Developer Platform node, 30-day backfill (7.65M logs, corpus retained) then a five-minute cursor tick. Stored as one row per recipient, day and sender, so counts, payers and dollars are exact over any window; per-transaction receipts are kept for addresses under 10k payments a month. Positive controls: three sampled transactions checked on Basescan to the cent, all EIP-3009; the index reconciled to the old provider's figures wherever that provider wasn't capped or window-shifted, and reads higher exactly where it was capped.

Not seen: any chain but Base; any asset but USDC; a seller whose payTo rotates per invoice (one listing rotates ~88 times a day and is excluded as ephemeral); x402 schemes that don't settle as EIP-3009. Shape is sampled, never enumerated. Shared addresses are attributed to the address. Dates of every correction to the numbers this page replaces are on /methodology (2026-08-29, entries 6–8).

Machine-readable twin: /state/the-ledger.json. Per-listing: onchain_daily, onchain_shape, onchain_payto_shared_listings on GET /v1/listings/:id. CC-BY-4.0; cite the URL.

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