Half the x402 sellers paid on Base were paid only by scanners.
An AI agent pays an x402 API per call, in USDC, with a payment it signs. Those payments land on chain, so it is tempting to read the count as demand: this seller had 2,000 payments, that one has 300 buyers. Some catalogs show such numbers next to their listings. We count the same payments for every x402 seller the Trust Index sees on Base, and looked at who makes them.
A few wallets pay almost everyone
Most paying wallets behave like customers: 1,281 of the 1,476 paid a single seller in those two days. A small group does something else. 14 wallets each paid 10 or more different sellers; one paid 330, the next 202, then 134 and 78. A buyer with a task doesn't call 330 different paid APIs in two days. A checker, monitor, test harness or research crawler does: it pays a little everywhere to see what comes back. (Our own spot-buy wallet, which does exactly that once a week, is left out of these counts.)
These wallets are not a problem. But their payments are not demand, and they are spread wide.
Half the paid sellers saw no one else
Of the 774 sellers that received a payment, 393 (51%) were paid only by those 14 wallets. Counting "sellers with paid traffic" therefore doubles the size of the market. Those 393 sellers received 1,349 payments together, 2.1% of all payments, and $29.59, less than 1% of the money.
The line between a scanner and a busy buyer is a choice, so here is the same count at other thresholds:
| Wallets that paid at least | Wallets | Sellers only they paid | Share of all payments those sellers got |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 sellers | 40 | 441 (57%) | 4.1% |
| 10 sellers | 14 | 393 (51%) | 2.1% |
| 25 sellers | 8 | 357 (46%) | 1.5% |
| 50 sellers | 5 | 328 (42%) | 1.3% |
Even counting only the five widest wallets, more than four in ten paid sellers had no other payer.
Where the money went
Sorted by how many ordinary payers (wallets that paid fewer than 10 sellers) each seller had:
| Ordinary payers | Sellers |
|---|---|
| None: only scanners | 393 |
| 1 | 249 |
| 2 to 9 | 106 |
| 10 to 99 | 24 |
| 100 or more | 2 |
The 26 sellers with ten or more ordinary payers received 44,201 payments (69%) and $1,669 (48% of the money). The ten busiest sellers alone took 67% of the payments. The biggest, with 11,794 payments and 139 payers in two days, had no scanner among its payers at all. The average payment was $0.055.
One ordinary payer can be a customer or the seller testing its own endpoint, and on chain the two look the same. So the 249 sellers with one ordinary payer are an upper bound on sellers with a real customer.
What this means
- For agents and the people who set them up: a seller's payment count is not a reputation. Ask who paid. A seller paid only by scanners has no buyer history yet, which is fine for a new service but no evidence that it delivers.
- For catalogs and marketplaces: unique buyers mean more once wallets that pay many sellers are counted apart.
- For sellers: if your only payments come from checkers, you have been found, not chosen. The next step is a buyer with a task. x402 Doctor's free web check now shows your own count: how many wallets paid your payout address on Base in the last 7 days, and how many of them were checkers.
From today x402 Doctor's pre-payment check says it in its on-chain line: how many wallets paid the seller's payout address on Base in the last 7 days, and how many of them pay 10 or more sellers, as checkers and scanners do. When all of them do, it says no ordinary buyer has been seen yet. It stays a signal only and never changes the verdict. The Trust Index shows the total.
How we measure
Every hour, a read-only job reads the new blocks on Base and counts, for each payout address the Trust Index's daily scan finds in x402 offers (1,826 on Base), the USDC payments the payer signed with EIP-3009 (transferWithAuthorization, the way x402's exact scheme settles). Plain transfers, Permit2 payments and Circle Gateway batches don't count, nor do other chains. A payment from the payout address to itself is left out, as is our own test wallet. Payers are counted by the first 40 bits of their address. The window is 19 and 20 October 2026: the count started on 19 October, so that day 68% of its blocks were read, and 20 October was read in full. The data is public: payments.json on the payments-data branch of x402 Doctor, and the totals in /api/trust/summary under onchain_payments.
What it can't see: who is behind a wallet, payments on other chains or through Gateway, and whether a payment bought anything. Our weekly spot-buy answers that last question separately.
Questions
How many x402 payments come from real buyers?
On 19–20 October 2026, 63,951 signed USDC payments on Base reached 774 x402 sellers. 14 wallets that each paid 10 or more different sellers, checkers and scanners, were the only payers of 393 of those sellers, but those sellers got only 2% of the payments. Most of the money went to a few sellers: 26 sellers with ten or more ordinary payers took 69% of the payments and 48% of the dollars.
What counts as a scanner payment?
A payment from a wallet that paid 10 or more different payout addresses in the same days. Ordinary buyers rarely do that: 1,281 of the 1,476 paying wallets paid a single seller. Such wallets belong to checkers, monitors, test harnesses and research. They are not bad, but they are not demand.
Does x402 Doctor show whether a seller has real buyers?
Yes. Since 21 October 2026 its paid pre-payment check says how many wallets paid the seller's Base payout address in the last 7 days, and how many of them are wallets that pay 10 or more sellers; when all are, it says no ordinary buyer has been seen yet. It never changes the verdict: new sellers start at zero.
Where is the data?
The hourly count is public: payments.json on the payments-data branch of github.com/Fizzl13/x402-doctor, with per payout address and day the number of payments, the USDC amount and the payers as 40-bit address prefixes. The totals are in GET https://x402-doctor.fizzl.eu/api/trust/summary under onchain_payments.