88% was a bridge.
The agents moved $57k.
August’s x402-shaped EVM flow was $2.59 billion. Strip the bridge and the agent-shaped payments on Base and Polygon are about $57,000. That is the market the standard is being written for.
Prepared for the x402 Foundation and its premier members — Visa, Stripe, Google, AWS, Coinbase. Secondary cut of Bitquery, x402stats, and agenteconomy.to. Not a new chain index. Windows are not added.
Derived from Bitquery’s August 2026 five-chain total of $2.59B and its 88% bridge share. Agent bar is $57,000 / $2.59B. Drawn to scale. A hairline is the whole agent pile.
Bridge
One contract. 34,577 payers.
Arbitrum was $2.33 billion of the $2.59 billion, 339,249 payments, median $25.61. CCTP extension 0xa95d9c1f655341597c94393fddc30cf3c08e4fce was 97.5% of that chain. Cross-chain USDC movement wearing an x402 shape. Not commerce.
Agent-shaped meter
71% of the payments. Almost none of the money.
Bitquery: seven tenths of Base and Polygon payments fit an agent shape and moved about $57,000 between them. Base was 9,698,150 payments, $35.9 million, median $0.006. One wallet sent 13.2 million payments at 183,820 prices. Label is inference. Repetition is not a buyer.
One-cent cycle
5.7 million payments. $57,115.
Polygon 0x66fa4d79ca84016b42352be33c908dd812952ec8 collected exactly one cent, 5.7 million times. A cutoff just under a cent deletes the loop from the agent count. Filter design is the finding.
Organic seller
91 wallets. Median $0.01.
x402stats, 30 days into early October: raw $960k across 37,495 wallets. Organic $793k across 91 businesses, down 32% in dollars, up 13 sellers. Top 10 held 76%. Trailing-week paying agents: ~0. Organic means ≥$100, ≥3 buyers, average ≥$0.001, and not a facilitator settlement wallet.
Facilitator share
Settlement throughput, not seller income. Coinbase 42%. PayAI 17%. Figment 16%. Meridian 13%. FluxA 9%. three-ws 1%. Meridian’s settlement wallet alone would rank as the largest “seller” at about $204k if it were not excluded.
Do not add these
| Cut | Figure |
|---|---|
| Bitquery, Aug, 5 EVM | $2.59B shaped |
| agenteconomy.to, Aug | $437,476 settled · 17.9M txs |
| x402stats organic, ~30d | $793k · 91 sellers |
The dollar gap is scope. Bridge-shaped transfers and a settlement index are different objects. Both can be true. Neither is agent GDP. November 2025 settled volume on the agenteconomy series was $20.5 million. August was $437,476. Count rose. Money did not come back.
What the Foundation should publish
- A weekly cut with four buckets: bridge, facilitator settlement, dust cycle, accepted buyer. Same definitions, append-only.
- Facilitator wallets labeled in the explorer. A settlement address is not a seller.
- Agent counted only after a delivery receipt, not after a sub-cent repeat.
- One public JSON. Versioned. Never silently restated.
ScriptMasterLabs will keep this cut current. The Foundation should own the canonical one. Until then, this is the page that can be cited.
Rerun
90 seconds. Bitquery August investigation · x402stats October · organic filters · agenteconomy.to · machine JSON
If a source moves, bump 2026-10-02.1. Do not merge windows. Do not call a 402 challenge a purchase.
Part of the x402 data cluster
This page’s job: one dated cut — the composition of August 2026 x402 settlement volume, and how little of it was agent-shaped.
- x402 statistics 2026: volume, sellers, prices — the canonical statistics page this cut belongs to.
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