What do x402 sellers sell, and where does the money go?
The short answer
Many kinds of data and tools, and the money does not follow the hosts. Blockchain data and on-chain tools were a small share of the hosts that quoted a price and close to half of the estimated buyer payments at the addresses read.
As published in the issue
Blockchain data and on-chain tools accounted for 7.2% of the x402 hosts that quoted a price and 48.5% of the October dollars we estimate buyers paid at the addresses we read.
(2) The OBSERVED population: every listed route probe402 read between 1 and 31 October 2026 — the route list was refreshed three times in the month — and every graded reading of it inside the sealed window, less the rows of probe402's own endpoint and of the endpoints a published probe402 correction scopes; a host, sector, price or payment-method figure is a count over those readings, the 2,152 hosts that returned a price quote are the hosts classified, and a host that was read and returned no payment challenge is counted rather than dropped.
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 host that returned a price quote in October, labelled by sector by two AI models working independently against one written rulebook, from the seller's own description of its routes, and the estimated buyer payments at each receiving address, by the sector of the host that quoted it. 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
- They agreed on 1,935 hosts (89.9%); that measures agreement, not accuracy.
- The host shares are not revenue or usage. The dollar shares cover the sellers we read.
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 join of two independent labelling passes over all 2,152 hosts against one written rulebook: where the two agree, the share of hosts in each sector by the payment method offered, the kind of service sold, and the central estimate's dollars by the sector of the host that quoted the receiving address. | 68320b490e2f18504421d03f9c0401bdf7859fab2e7d9b9e39a7a664c803149e |
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.