Where registration meets payment

Two layers that are usually discussed as one. This page joins them on the only thing they share — an address — and reports what survives. Every figure is scoped to the four pinned runs listed at the foot of the page, and every one of them is a lower bound.

measured 2026-07-30|354,858 agents|four chains

1 in 991

agents has ever been paid — 358 of 354,858. “Paid” means an external stablecoin transfer arriving after the agent was minted, at the wallet its own document declared.

1 in 10,437

has ever received a settlement through x402 — 34 agents, and 32of them are on one chain. x402 is the ecosystem’s own payment protocol.

0.017%

of x402’s top-100 seller volume is agent-linked, tested against an index built by someone else, by a different method, that has no concept of ERC-8004.

Per chain

lower bounds

Two stablecoins per chain and nothing else, so every value is a floor rather than a total. Symbols and decimals were read from each contract rather than assumed — BNB Chain’s USDC and USDT are 18 decimals, not 6.

chain	agents	ever paid	rate	ever x402	external value	from contracts
base	60,097	181	0.301%	32	$1,164,083	93.9%
bsc	244,208	128	0.052%	0	$1,639,492	86.5%
mainnet	40,806	31	0.076%	0	$203,121	68.1%
celo	9,747	18	0.185%	2	$2,813	50.8%
all four	354,858	358	0.101%	34	$3,009,509	—

Attestation does not predict payment. Celo attests at 79.5% and pays at 0.185% — a ratio of 430 to 1. Its attestation rate was three addresses writing feedback for one platform’s batch of agents; it was never a measure of commerce. No report should let one of these measures stand in for the other.

Checked against a second source

x402scan

The reverse direction, which is the stronger result: rather than asking whether our agents appear in an external index, we asked whether that index’s busiest sellers are registered agents.

top EVM sellers examined: 138
…that are a declared agentWallet: 0
…that own an agent, on any of the four chains: 3
x402scan's top 100 by volume: $49,617,581
our corroborated agent addresses: $8,596

Zero of the 138 is a declared agentWallet. The three that own an agent all sell on Base while owning an agent on a different chain — address reuse by an operator, not an agent being paid.

What this does not establish:a matching address confirms that a settlement occurred and who received it — never who initiated it or why. And a non-matching seller is not “not an agent”; it is not a registered ERC-8004 identity on the four chains we sweep. That is the finding: the registry is not where the payment activity is.

x402scan publishes no statement of limits of its own, so this caveat is ours and is not attributed to them. Its index is facilitator-scoped where ours reads the chain directly, and it covers base, solana, polygon and optimism — not Celo, BNB Chain or Ethereum mainnet. www.x402scan.com, queried 2026-07-30.

Over time

one observation

This is the number worth watching, and there is exactly one of it. The chart below is deliberately not a trend — a line through a single point is a drawing, not a measurement.

Agents that have ever been paid, across all four chains. Updated per sweep; a rate that falls is as publishable as one that rises, and this project has no stake in which.

Provenance

reproducible

base: run cfbfcc01-fdaf-409f-9bed-abf706d865c7 · block 49,262,617
bsc: run f78c7891-e787-43f1-9748-61d5a361e9ff · block 112,874,357
mainnet: run 18a25593-9098-40fd-a0d2-75553c6ee31d · block 25,640,407
celo: run 7833fc49-a5b7-477b-99ce-946f650f0064 · block 73,448,013

The payments scan reads token transfer logs and EIP-3009 authorisations directly, so these figures are not produced by the census API and are not recomputed per page load. They are published numbers with a date on them. The full working, including the four corrections made before publication and the one caught during the cross-check, is in the report.

The full report →What each rung measures →