Beneath the x402 hype, there’s a real economy of agents, humans and facilitators moving real volume on-chain as an agent-native payment rail.
We pulled the data to see what’s really going on.
Our scope
• Focus on x402 transactions on @base
• Cluster wallets into “agent-like” vs “human-like” based on behaviour
• Analyse volume, transaction counts, facilitators and recipients
Goal: to get a read on how “machine-to-machine” x402 really is today
- - - - -
x402 is basically USDC and Base today
Although x402 supports multiple tokens, ~99% of recorded volume settles in USDC while Base handles ~89% of x402 transactions
That’s driven by
• Deep integration in @coinbase CDP and Base
• Preference for stable, compliant collateral in automated flows
• Since Base is the main chain, its great for UX and tooling but also concentrates platform + policy risk if agent commerce scales
Every x402 payment touches 4 actors: a client (human, app or agent), a server (API, content or service), a facilitator (e.g. Coinbase CDP) and the chain (Base). You can think of facilitators as mini card networks for agents: they abstract away auth, key management and fee logic while still settling in public stablecoins.
Coinbase is still the most active facilitator by transaction count --> it’s the infra backbone for early x402 adoption. But by active senders, the picture is more competitive:
• Coinbase now shares user dominance with PayAI and DayDreams
• Heurist is emerging as a new challenger
• Agents and apps are not locked into a single rail
On the recipient side, Questflow stands out as it consistently routes payments to the widest and most decentralised set of downstream sellers, looking more like a marketplace that aggregates a long tail of service providers. Other facilitators tend to have more concentrated recipient sets, behaving like vertical SaaS rails tightly integrated with a small number of partners.
We also breakdown the data to show
• Agents are already meaningful contributors to dollar volume
• There is a non-trivial share of x402 volume and tx sits in the highest-confidence agent clusters
• x402 is already a machine-heavy rail
The question isn’t whether x402 works, it is whether the ecosystem broadens beyond USDC + Base and makes it the default way software pays for software. If that happens, the current phase is literally the pre-history of an agentic commerce economy.
- - - - -
Read more here: mementoresearch.com/inside-x402-ma…
We pulled the data to see what’s really going on.
Our scope
• Focus on x402 transactions on @base
• Cluster wallets into “agent-like” vs “human-like” based on behaviour
• Analyse volume, transaction counts, facilitators and recipients
Goal: to get a read on how “machine-to-machine” x402 really is today
- - - - -
x402 is basically USDC and Base today
Although x402 supports multiple tokens, ~99% of recorded volume settles in USDC while Base handles ~89% of x402 transactions
That’s driven by
• Deep integration in @coinbase CDP and Base
• Preference for stable, compliant collateral in automated flows
• Since Base is the main chain, its great for UX and tooling but also concentrates platform + policy risk if agent commerce scales
Every x402 payment touches 4 actors: a client (human, app or agent), a server (API, content or service), a facilitator (e.g. Coinbase CDP) and the chain (Base). You can think of facilitators as mini card networks for agents: they abstract away auth, key management and fee logic while still settling in public stablecoins.
Coinbase is still the most active facilitator by transaction count --> it’s the infra backbone for early x402 adoption. But by active senders, the picture is more competitive:
• Coinbase now shares user dominance with PayAI and DayDreams
• Heurist is emerging as a new challenger
• Agents and apps are not locked into a single rail
On the recipient side, Questflow stands out as it consistently routes payments to the widest and most decentralised set of downstream sellers, looking more like a marketplace that aggregates a long tail of service providers. Other facilitators tend to have more concentrated recipient sets, behaving like vertical SaaS rails tightly integrated with a small number of partners.
We also breakdown the data to show
• Agents are already meaningful contributors to dollar volume
• There is a non-trivial share of x402 volume and tx sits in the highest-confidence agent clusters
• x402 is already a machine-heavy rail
The question isn’t whether x402 works, it is whether the ecosystem broadens beyond USDC + Base and makes it the default way software pays for software. If that happens, the current phase is literally the pre-history of an agentic commerce economy.
- - - - -
Read more here: mementoresearch.com/inside-x402-ma…
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