Who settles x402 payments, and how concentrated is settlement?
Answered from the issue named below, as published on its date. A later issue is a later answer, at its own address.
The answer
Most settlement routing cannot be identified from published payment challenges: 1,229 of 1,677 catalogue hosts (73.3%) publish no information identifying the party that would settle the payment — the facilitator. Among the hosts where routing is visible, Coinbase dominates: 405 of the 438 attributable hosts (92.5%) route to Coinbase (next: PayAI, 38). Two things this figure is not: hosts bound to a facilitator are not settlement volume, and the invisible 73.3% are unknown, not Coinbase.
(1) The CATALOGUE population: every route listed on the two public route catalogues, combined and de-duplicated, at one stamped read on 2026-09-01 — the read the issue's route, host and service counts are quoted against, with a second complete read 93 minutes later kept as the cross-check.
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 this does not say
- Hosts bound to one settling party are not settlement volume, and the hosts that publish no routing information are unknown rather than attributed to anybody.
The evidence
What ran, when, and the record it produced.
| What ran | When | Record |
|---|---|---|
| One fresh full read of both public route catalogues, combined and de-duplicated: route shares by operator, settlement routing attributed from published payment challenges against a re-fetched public registry, and the count of listed routes that publish no usable request example. | b34ac16e2eba36d319f1423b2b2c348d8b4d2ad022c12e2eae6e9a41e3ce53c5 |
- Sealed days behind the archive figures
- 11
- Observations in that window
- 29,022
- Issue
- Machine Commerce Reality Index: #001 — August 2026
- Published
The terms
The terms this question uses are defined in the glossary.
Corrections and disputes
This answer names a party we measure. The route to dispute a reading is on the corrections page.
Corrections to this issue are on the corrections register, and this answer reads from the record rather than from a copy.