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State of x402, on one page

The numbers people ask for first, recomputed every Monday. Prints on one page, which is more than most briefs manage.

A printable one-page brief on x402: genuine volume, buyers, sellers, prices, infrastructure and publishers.

x402 Clean Index · one page · week of 21 Sep 2026

Of every dollar that moved through x402 on Base last week, 55% survives removing manufactured, single-buyer and test payments: $73k a week, or $3.81M a year at this rate.

Volume
$134k settled through x402 facilitators on Base in the week of 21 Sep 2026; $73k (55%) is demand-cleaned. The biggest cut: sellers with a single buyer ($59k). Clean volume was $51k in the week of 24 Aug (+44% over 4 weeks). Annualised, the latest week is $3.81M a year of demand-cleaned spend (latest week × 52; an upper bound on genuine demand, not a forecast).
Buyers
8,176 genuine buyer wallets, 4,364 of them new. Median spend $0.0745 a week. 93% pay a single seller. The 96 wallets spending $100+ bring 62% of clean dollars.
Sellers
637 sellers with 2+ genuine buyers. The top 10 hold 94% of clean dollars (HHI 2,306, the equivalent of 4.3 equal-sized sellers).
What sells
Large ticket (unidentified) is the largest category at $38k (51%). Content + data (articles, reports, prices and records) is $1,914 (2.6%), −20% over four weeks.
Prices
Half of priced listings ask $0.01 or less per call; the top tenth ask $0.05 or more.
Infrastructure
Coinbase settles 99% of clean dollars. 95% of 2,798 listed endpoints checked on 2026-09-30 answer a valid 402; 96% of those at their listed price.
Publishers
26% of top-1,000 sites with a robots.txt block at least one AI crawler by name; 1 of 685 state a machine-readable price.

Method. Every USDC settlement sent by 128 known x402 facilitators on Base, minus my own payments, closed loops, funding-linked pairs, fan-out manufacture and single-buyer sellers. The filters are conservative, so clean volume is a ceiling on genuine demand, not a floor. Requiring 2+ genuine buyers per seller is the filter that moves the headline most: with no minimum (1 buyer) clean volume would be $132k (+79.9%); at 3+ it is $73k (−0.4%), at 5+ $70k (−4.2%). Method note · Market dashboard · API

Cite. Knipe, W. (2026). State of x402, week of 21 Sep 2026. wknipe.com/x402/brief/. Data: x402 Clean Index, CC BY 4.0.

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