We measured the entire x402 economy. Almost everyone is selling where the money isn't.
July 11, 2026 — Stelar Digital. We sell on these rails ourselves; every number below is either measured by us today or cited to its source.
x402 is the payment protocol that lets AI agents pay for API calls with stablecoins, per request, no accounts. It's real: Chainalysis counts over 100 million cumulative transactions on Base. Coinbase runs a public discovery catalog of every registered x402 endpoint. Today we measured all of it.
What we measured (method first)
We queried Coinbase's public x402 discovery catalog (the same index agent buyers search). Totals come from the catalog's own pagination metadata; distributions come from a 2,000-resource sample across 20 evenly spaced offsets. Anyone can reproduce this — it's a public API.
The supply side
- 25,443 registered endpoints in the catalog as of today.
- Our sampling puts the seller base at roughly two to four thousand distinct wallets (2,000-resource sample: 173 unique sellers; resources-per-seller varied 6–12 across samples, so we give a range, not fake precision).
- Median asking price: $0.02 per call.
- 97.8% of priced endpoints ask less than $0.10. 99.6% ask less than $1. The most expensive endpoint we sampled: $4.99.
The demand side
- Chainalysis (on-chain): transactions of $1 or more grew from 49% to 95% of x402 volume. The money moved upmarket, fast.
- KPMG's tracker: 417,000 buyers vs 83,000 sellers all-time, about $43.6M settled — roughly $500 lifetime revenue for the average seller.
Put those together: the entire supply side is priced at $0.02 in a market where 95% of the money moves at $1 and up. Twenty-five thousand endpoints are fishing where the fish aren't.
Our own receipts (we're not spectators)
We've had 13 paid endpoints live with full catalog presence since early July, trimmed to 8 after retiring 7 commodity wrappers that never sold. As of 2026-09-02 01:45 UTC, real settled calls and real, on-chain lifetime revenue — small, real, and updated automatically. Live figures: /open.
We also repriced into the band where the money actually moves — a $1.00 market brief and a $2.50 deep signal bundle. Public judge date: July 25. Zero settled bundle calls so far. If bundles at real prices don't convert either, we'll publish that too. Receipts either way.
New: a second settlement rail. The same top-three data endpoints (telemetry, price check, grid parameters) are now live on Algorand mainnet, settled via the GoPlausible x402 facilitator, at api-algo.stelardigital.com — USDC per call, no accounts. It's live and serving signed 402 payment challenges now; the first on-chain settle landed 2026-07-23T23:37:32Z (tx DX6P544HF6T6…).
What this census means
- The rail works; the market hasn't formed. 100M+ transactions is infrastructure proof, not demand proof — most registered endpoints have likely never seen a paying agent.
- Pricing is cargo-cult. Thousands of sellers copied micro-pricing from demos while actual settled volume concentrated at $1+. If you sell on x402, your price is probably 50x too low.
- The opportunity isn't panning — it's picks, shovels, and maps. With ~83K sellers averaging ~$500 ever, seller-side tooling (delivery receipts, buyer analytics, honest catalogs) is the underbuilt layer. We maintain x402-receipts, an open-source verifiable-receipts library (v0.3 shipped today with delivery attestation), proposed as a protocol extension.
The franchise promise
We'll re-run this census monthly and publish the deltas: endpoints, sellers, price distribution, and our own revenue — wins or zeroes. If you sell on x402 and want seller-side tooling (know who's buying, prove what you delivered), email stelardigital@stelardigital.com with subject "seller console" — if enough sellers raise a hand, we build it; if not, we'll say that too.
Sources: Coinbase CDP x402 discovery catalog (measured 2026-07-11); Chainalysis x402 on-chain analysis; KPMG agentic-payments tracker.