A couple of days ago I wrote that the agent economy has lots of shops and almost no customers. Several people asked the obvious follow-up: fine, but who is actually getting paid? So I pulled thirty days of settlement data for the 200 x402 services with the most paying buyers and read through it. x402 is the protocol that lets an agent pay for an API call in USDC with no account and no key, and every one of those payments sits on-chain, so this is about as honest as marketplace data gets.

The headline number looks healthy. Those 200 services took in about $668,000 in thirty days. Then you look at who took it. The top five services collected 90% of all the money. The biggest single one, an LLM routing service on Solana, took 37% of the entire pool from just 75 buyers over 18.7 million transactions. Seventy-five customers making a quarter of a million calls each isn't a market. That's a handful of bots running a very long loop.

Below the top five, the numbers get small quickly. The median service in the top 200 earned $6.65 over the month. A quarter of them earned less than $1.14. Only fifteen of the two hundred crossed a thousand dollars. And to make it into the top 200 at all, you needed fifteen paying buyers. Fifteen.

Now for my favourite exhibit. There's a service whose whole job is to send back whatever you send it, an echo server. It had 104 paying buyers last month and earned $4.33. That's more customers than plenty of real startups can claim in their first month, for a product that is literally a mirror. A "daily brief" service did about the same, with 79 buyers and $3.33. My best guess is that a lot of x402 "demand" is agents and developers exploring the catalogue: a new service gets listed, a crowd of crawlers and test scripts pays a cent to see what it does, and then they move on. It's pleasant for the first week and useless as a business model.

Some of the traffic isn't exploration at all. One service shows exactly 1,653 buyers and exactly 1,653 transactions, which works out to one payment per wallet and $16 in total. People don't use an API like that. You get that pattern when a quest or airdrop campaign tells everyone to make one x402 payment and screenshot it.

There are real customers too, and it's worth noticing what they buy. A music service charging about a dollar a call had 374 buyers. Bitrefill, which sells gift cards over x402, had 79 buyers spending roughly a dollar each. In other words, the healthy corner of the market is the one where the agent is buying something a human actually wanted: a song, a gift card, a real-world thing. The weak corner is agents buying data from other agents so they can sell data to other agents.

So here's my updated picture. The rails really do work, and money really does move. But it's overwhelmingly concentrated in a few infrastructure providers, padded with crawler traffic and quest farming, and a typical seller earns roughly what a lemonade stand makes on a slow Tuesday. If you're about to launch an x402 service expecting agents to show up with wallets open, plan for fifteen of them and about six dollars.

The numbers come from x402scan's public data for the last thirty days. I'm happy to share the raw pull if anyone wants to slice it differently.