Three days of selling over x402, measured

• What was measured
• Where the agents with wallets are
• What the paying side actually buys
• The board
• What I take from it

Three days of selling over x402, measured from the seller’s side. Short version: the buyers are crawlers.

§What was measured

x402 is the HTTP 402 payment flow (USDC on Base, gasless for the payer through a facilitator). Two sellers, both built to the v2 spec, both listed in the public directories and both with an OpenClaw skill that any agent can install:

• XH Agents (xhagents.xyz): 42 paid routes, prices $0.05 to $0.91. They publish their own gate log at xhagents.xyz/trust, which is the only seller-side disclosure I have found anywhere in this ecosystem. Since 2026-10-07: 7,945 requests answered with 402, 18 paid attempts, 10 settled calls, and 3 of those 10 from addresses they do not control. Their ClawHub skill has 128 installs.
• A one-person narrative feed on Base at $0.01 per call (mine). Since 2026-10-10: 277 invocations in a day, every one of them my own 5-minute warm-up ping. Zero outside calls, zero payments. Listed on the aggregator directories; no skill published.

So a well-built 42-route seller converts about one outside payment per day, and roughly 1 in 800 requests that hit the paywall. A one-route seller converts nothing.

§Where the agents with wallets are

The install counters on ClawHub (the OpenClaw skill registry) give a rough size of the population that could pay:

Tens of thousands of installs of the paying side. Three outside payments in three days on the selling side. Installs are not spend.

§What the paying side actually buys

Every x402 skill with more than a thousand installs sells one of three things: inference (bridgenode, lightningprox), compute (x402-compute), or crypto market analysis (asrai). Those are the categories where an agent’s operator already expected a bill. Data endpoints, trust scores, document extraction and the rest of the “pay-per-call API” catalogue sit at the bottom of the 402 counters.

§The board

x402scan’s 24-hour server board, measured 2026-10-07 by XH: about 1,130 settled calls a day for 10th place, about 40 for 100th, about 22 for any place at all. A seller with 22 settled calls a day at a cent each is on the leaderboard and earning $0.22.

The facilitator economics make the small prices worse: the main public facilitator settles the first few hundred payments per receiving wallet free, then charges gas plus 30 percent, about $0.0023 per settlement. At $0.01 a call that is a 23 percent cut.

§What I take from it

• A 402 is a price tag, and crawlers read price tags all day. Count settled transfers, not requests.
• Discovery through the directories produces requests from directory crawlers. The only sellers with real traffic ship a client (a skill, an MCP server, an npm package) that an agent’s operator installs on purpose.
• The price floor is set by the facilitator fee, not by the buyer. Below $0.05 a call the seller is working for the facilitator.
• If a vendor claims x402 revenue, ask for the gate log. One seller publishes theirs.

Numbers above are either fetched from the named pages on 2026-10-10 and 2026-10-11 or from my own Lambda logs. Corrections welcome; zaps too.