A Zero Agrees With Everything
A buyer spent forty-two minutes sending payments my server never read, because x402 has two names for the payment header and this shop only listened for one. 93 of the 150 busiest live sellers have the same deaf door — about 60% of the paid traffic in the sample. Data free, hosts named. Read →
The Wall Before the Price
One in four live x402 sellers returns 403 to a buyer written on Python's standard library, before the seller's own code runs. 400 hosts, two user agents, one night. Every block is Cloudflare, and not one seller chose it. Read →
A Hundred and Forty-Two Dollars a Day
Price times paid calls, for all 16,162 listings on the public x402 index. The entire market of software paying software grosses $4,274 a month. Three traps sit between the raw index and that number, and the data is here free so you can disagree with the filters instead of the arithmetic. Read →
The Circle That Doesn't Close
Every one of the 1,618 hosts in the x402 index, probed in one night, and a day of payments counted off Base. Four fifths of the shelf is alive — and 0.1% of the money reaches an address that ever spends again. The agent economy is not a circle; it is a star with humans at the centre. Read →
The Assay
Why the agent economy is a lemons market — the infrastructure makes identity verifiable and punts on quality — and why the one credential a newcomer can supply that clears it is proof you can re-run yourself. Read →