How much do customers pay x402 sellers in a month?
The short answer
Tens of thousands of dollars in October, at the payment addresses that listed x402 services quoted on Base. By the central estimate, most of what those addresses received in signed transfers came from customer purchases, and the estimate moves with which payment patterns count as evidence of a purchase.
As published in the issue
Listed x402 services quoted 2,273 payment addresses on the Base blockchain. In October, those addresses received $50,331 in signed transfers after excluding our own payments. We estimate that about $32,300 of that money came from customer purchases. The estimate ranges from $19,500 to $34,000 depending on which payment patterns count as evidence of a purchase.
(1) The ADDRESS population: the 2,273 payment addresses on the Base blockchain that listed x402 services quoted in October 2026, each read for every incoming USDC transfer on all 31 days of the month on two independent public copies of the chain; a transfer is counted when it was made under a signed authorisation, probe402's own payments are excluded, and the zero address that two listed hosts quoted is set aside as no one's wallet; a figure for money reaching listed sellers, for a filter or for one host's address is a sum over those transfers and never a register's total.
The sentence above is quoted from a published issue and is not re-written here. Its date, its population and the record behind it are below.
What we measured
Every incoming USDC transfer made under a signed authorisation, on every day of October, at the Base payment addresses that listed x402 services quoted, read on two independent public copies of the chain and then filtered by rules for which payments count as a customer purchase. The exact population rule is quoted beside the figure below, and the limits that bound it beneath.
What the evidence shows
- Sealed days behind the archive figures
- 31
- Observations in that window
- 412,533
- Issue
- Machine Commerce Reality Index: #003 — October 2026
- Published
31 days
2026-10-01 · 2026-10-02 · 2026-10-03 · 2026-10-04 · 2026-10-05 · 2026-10-06 · 2026-10-07 · 2026-10-08 · 2026-10-09 · 2026-10-10 · 2026-10-11 · 2026-10-12 · 2026-10-13 · 2026-10-14 · 2026-10-15 · 2026-10-16 · 2026-10-17 · 2026-10-18 · 2026-10-19 · 2026-10-20 · 2026-10-21 · 2026-10-22 · 2026-10-23 · 2026-10-24 · 2026-10-25 · 2026-10-26 · 2026-10-27 · 2026-10-28 · 2026-10-29 · 2026-10-30 · 2026-10-31
All 31 days behind these figures (1–31 Oct 2026) are sealed, each with its published hash on the Integrity page; each date opens that day's manifest.
What this does not say
- Low, central and high are three filters applied in turn, not a statistical interval.
- We can miss a seller paying from another wallet, or a tester whose wallet is unpublished, so the true figure can be lower. We can also exclude real customers who received a refund, bought from many addresses or bought just once, so it can be higher. A repeat purchase at the listed price still leaves the buyer's identity uncertain.
Method and reproduction
The runs behind the figures, the record each one produced, and the terms this question uses.
What ran, when, and the record it produced.
| What ran | When | Record hash |
|---|---|---|
| The filters over those transfers: the measured total with probe402's own payments removed and the zero address set aside, then the high, central and low figures in turn, each with what it removed, and the same figures for each receiving address. Arithmetic over the filed rows, checked against a hand-built case with a known answer. | 9642313155b78db4a92772f06f7c0fb8393be773d36e1072cbf4d0c1c9b0f6e3 | |
| Every incoming USDC transfer at the 2,274 addresses, the 2,273 the issue counts and the zero address, for each day of October, read from two public Base nodes that agreed on every range — 1,648,701 transfers, 1,504,250 of them made under a signed authorisation — with each transfer kept as a row. | f8155cfdf35f14c9c81f59bf6934a905e90f8fcc592645e93e42b76bd1d614e1 |
The terms
The terms this question uses are defined in the glossary.
Corrections and disputes
Corrections to this issue are on the corrections register, and this answer reads from the record rather than from a copy.