S StelarDigital
census / the state of x402

We measured the entire x402 economy. Almost everyone is selling where the money isn't.

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

The demand side

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. Organic result: exactly one sale, for $0.03. Lifetime x402 revenue: $0.06. We are the median seller in this census, and we can prove it — our live numbers are public at /open.

So today we took our own medicine: we repriced into the band where the money actually moves — a $1.00 market brief and a $2.50 deep signal bundle. We set a public judge date (July 25). If bundles at real prices don't convert either, we'll publish that too. Receipts either way.

What this census means

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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. Our numbers: stelardigital.com/open.

See our own live receipts and numbers on these rails.

See the open metrics →