Analysis generated from our live index of every ERC-8004 agent we can see on Base and Ethereum. Numbers are pulled live; nothing here is hand-curated. Also see the cross-chain stats compilation: How many ERC-8004 agents are there? Per-chain adoption stats.
Agents on our pages now sit on four steps: Reachable, Transact-ready, Payment verified and Has paying customers. What each step means, what changed in the counts, and why the old Proven label is gone. Read →
A free check shows what a buyer sees when it calls your x402 endpoint. Here is why we built it, what our daily paid tests found, and when the $0.50 full test is worth it. Read →
A “last checked” date is only useful if it marks a real request to the agent’s endpoint. Here is what we check, how often, and how to read a check. Read →
Eight platforms account for 5,903 of 26,787 indexed ERC-8004 agents on Base and Ethereum. What these platforms are, how we spot them, why it matters when you read an agent ranking, and how platform-listed agents now appear on our pages. Read →
When someone says an ERC-8004 agent has been paid, they can mean three different things. Owner wallet received payments, paid to the agent's own address, and reviews from paid jobs give very different counts. Here is what each one shows and what our API now returns. Read →
About 200 ERC-8004 agents advertise x402 payments. 19 are Transact-ready. Where the rest stop: no working endpoint, no readable price or payment address, or our anti-spam checks. Read →
Two public ERC-8004 reputation explorers (8004agents.ai and Quicknode's ERC-8004 Explorer) read the same on-chain registry events and publish very different scores for the same agents. On a 16-agent sample across Base and Ethereum, probed 2026-10-13, the median absolute gap is 12.5 points, and only 5 of 16 agents are within 5 points of each other. Quicknode's formula v1.4 publishes its weights (feedback × 0.5882 + sybil × 0.2353 + reliability × 0.1765); 8004agents.ai renders the reputation integer directly from the ERC-8004 feedback events. The sybil component drives the biggest divergences — the outlier (agent 25975) is 0 at 8004agents.ai and 71 at Quicknode because the formula awards 70.6 from the other two components alone when sybil = 0. 16 of 16 agents carry verified: false at 8004agents.ai (incl. the top-3 of its own Base leaderboard); 0 of 16 have any ValidationRegistry response — confirms, from the explorer side, that the ERC-8004 trust gap is the empty validation surface. Companion sibling dataset (data.csv, sample.json, CC BY 4.0). Not a scoring change. Read →
A 10-stage per-chain payability funnel from Registered on-chain to Delivered after payment. Base: 23,403 registered → 134 advertise → 25 publish a parseable price in the normal range (≤ $1.00/call) → 10 delivered a real response when we paid them in three dated test-purchase pilots. Ethereum: 2,946 registered → 7 advertise → 2 priced → 0 paid in this window. Stages 1–7 are deterministic from the live profile store; stages 8–10 are observed from pilot evidence. Full round spend: $0.5854 USDC. Dataset with METHOD.md, DATA-DICTIONARY.md, GRADE.md, dataset.csv, dataset.jsonld, and snapshot.json. Not a scoring change — a tracked measurement, snapshotted daily from now on. Read →
Observational re-probe of every live 402 body on 84 ERC-8004 agents, 2026-10-12. We ran all 280 bodies through three parsers: the frozen legacy v1 npm [email protected] Zod schema (last published 2026-04-16), the v2-aware @x402/[email protected] / @x402/[email protected] (shipped 2026-09-29), and python x402==2.25.0. 49 of 280 (17.5%) parse under legacy v1; 249 of 280 (88.9%) parse under @x402/[email protected] at the per-accepts-entry level; 262 of 280 (93.6%) parse under python. 200 bodies that v1 rejects now parse under v2 — the measured upgrade delta. The 31 bodies v2 still rejects are three single-seller patterns (empty asset, non-x402 responder, non-JSON) characterised in the post. Our own 402 was one of the v1 failures a day earlier, since fixed. Read →
Observational probe of every x402 endpoint advertised in the on-chain metadata of 84 ERC-8004 agents on Base and Ethereum, 2026-10-11. One unauthenticated request per endpoint; no X-PAYMENT header. 270 of 412 endpoints (66%) returned a valid 402 challenge; 58 of 84 agents (69%) are payable now — Base 55 of 76 (72%), Ethereum 3 of 8 (38%). payTo cross-check: 70 of 70 live payTo values matched the on-chain declared payTo (zero divergence). Median per-call price $0.02. Multi-chain surprise: beyond Base + Ethereum, 17 of 58 payable agents accept USDC on Solana, with Algorand / XRPL / Polygon all represented. Includes a self-authored interop lesson — our own 402 was unparseable by canonical npm [email protected] until 2026-10-12 (fixed: network: "base", omit outputSchema). Read →
Buyer-side field test on the Base x402 agent-payments economy. 4 Transact-ready ERC-8004 agents scanned, 3 payable at a $0.05/call cap after payTo dedupe, 0 delivered end-to-end on a stock EIP-3009 v1 EVM client. Three distinct failure classes recorded (auth-wall, v1-vs-v2 payload mismatch, facilitator-vs-USDC-domain mismatch); zero USDC moved on-chain. A re-run after a dual-version client fix returned isValid:true on verify-only for both of the two protocol failures. Includes a seven-item buyer-side checklist and a “how to test without spending” verify-only pattern. Read →
Side-by-side explainer. ERC-8004 (Trustless Agents, Draft 2025-08-13) is identity + reputation + validation; ERC-8183 (Agentic Commerce, Draft 2026-02-25) is a client-funded job lifecycle with evaluator attestation. Comparison table, how the two stack via the optional reputation hook, and a five-step pre-hire checklist that walks the per-chain hubs, per-agent pages, and the paid x402 lookups. Primary sources cited; live headline numbers from /v1/public/stats. Read →
A dated per-chain census of the ERC-8004 ReputationRegistry on Base and Ethereum mainnet, snapshot 2026-10-09 22:04 UTC. We index every NewFeedback event — hundreds of thousands on Base, tens of thousands on Ethereum — and this piece publishes the shape of that data. Three findings up top: a cluster of spray wallets drives the overwhelming majority of Ethereum feedback and a sizeable share of Base feedback; one Base agent (BOTCOIN) alone carries roughly seven in ten Base events; Ethereum's raw top-10 is one NFT-style batch collection under a single owner. The Sybil-aware ranking surfaces a very different top-10 on each chain. Aggregate CSV at /data/erc8004-reputation-census-2026-10.csv. Read →
Two guardrails now sit on top of the Readiness & Trust composite. A batch-publisher cap drops an agent to Promising at best if its publisher has already minted 100 or more agents on the chain. A name gate rejects Transact-ready for names ≤ 3 chars, NFT-style #<int> suffixes, batch patterns like WATCH-01, or the words test / stale / stub / placeholder / demo / example. Ethereum Transact-ready moves 412 → 276; Base 5,090 → 1,955. Demoted profiles now show the rule that caught them. Read →
ERC-8183 is a DRAFT ERC (Ethereum Magicians, “ERC-8183: Agentic Commerce”): client escrows funds, provider delivers, evaluator attests, with an optional reputation hook writing to the ERC-8004 ReputationRegistry at settlement. We join the draft to our live Base + Ethereum reputation index and the committed Arbitrum public-RPC census to answer the pre-escrow question: how many registered providers would pass an evaluator’s reputation check today? Read →
Full-history, public-RPC-reproducible census of ERC-8004 on Arbitrum One at 2026-10-07. 1,604 registry mints across 1,000 addresses (top-1 17.02%, top-10 31.61%); 108 agents received on-chain feedback from 36 clients across 973 events; zero Alchemy credits. +6.79% over the 2026-09-17 freeze. Arbitrum is MEASURED here, not indexed. Read →
Full-pagination snapshot of the Coinbase CDP x402 Bazaar at 2026-10-05. One host alone holds 39% of the listings, the top ten hold 58%, and a seeded 100-URL liveness probe returned 1% HTTP 200. Narrative companion to the dated dataset page. Read →
Two shapes at once in the Coinbase CDP Bazaar. The catalog is not accumulating on net, while the subset crossing the five-paying-wallet bar is growing much faster. Demand is fanning out to new entrants even as top earners persist. Read →
Two months after Part 5, the gap between a raw ERC-8004 mint and a payable counterparty is now visible in four distinct on-chain cohorts: registered, signposted, resolvable, and commerce-backed. Each one is a different number. Read →
A buyer facing an unknown x402 endpoint has four different questions, and the public scoring surfaces each answer a different one. Names the predicate ladder every credible surface sits on — and the one layer nobody measures yet. Read →
Five checks to run against public data before paying an unknown x402 endpoint. Each check is backed by one of our live numbers — payer cohorts, publisher concentration, ownership walk-back, publisher size, commerce-backed reputation. Read →
Every public number circulating for the x402 ecosystem is an estimate, a projection, or a press figure. This is the reference cut we measure daily from the same live CDP Bazaar snapshot the market map and price census render from. Read →
Same live CDP Bazaar snapshot, opposite picture. The five-unique-payer cohort carries the overwhelming majority of indexed 30-day requests. The exactly-one-payer cohort inverts it, and the median call count for that cohort is one. Read →
AP2 arrived with sixty-plus launch partners and an Apache-2.0 reference implementation. It authenticates the transaction via signed Mandates. It does not score the counterparty agent — the trust layer sitting under commoditising payment rails. Read →
Cloudflare's Wallets announcement gives AI agents a payment identity, a spending cap, and x402 micropayments — the buyer-side half of the stack. Rails are commoditising. The trust filter that tells a wallet who is worth paying is not. Read →
Measured 2026-08-16: a small fraction of indexed Base and Ethereum ERC-8004 registrations publish a discoverable A2A agent-card. Hop-by-hop traversal audit over seven live agents names the single binding hop, with concrete fix examples. Read →
A June 2026 protocol-governance survey scopes reputation out of its taxonomy on the grounds ERC-8004 handles it. An independent empirical study measures that same registry and finds it cannot function as a trust signal. Read →
Two whole-catalog measurements of the x402 agent-payments economy — one from the supply side, one from the demand side — converge on the same shape. A large listing surface and a tiny paying cohort. A directory of agents is close to worthless. Read →
Imperial College finds most ERC-8004 registrations are placeholders and the ReputationRegistry cannot function as a trust signal. Their May snapshot reconciled against our live August index. Commerce-backed reputation is the architectural fix. Read →
Original data. We downloaded and scanned the entire Coinbase x402 Bazaar catalog to map the agent-intelligence market: who sells ERC-8004 reputation, at what price, and how little anyone is buying yet. Snapshot as of 13 August 2026. Read →
Independent research and core Ethereum infrastructure (The Graph, x402, ERC-8004) converge on the same question: how many registered ERC-8004 agents are actually operational? Our commerce-backed cohort and per-chain live-rate audit answer it. Read →
Biggest index is a vanity metric. Live plus commerce-backed is what matters. The chain-quality numbers, the placeholder tail, and the commerce-backed counts behind the decision to focus on Base and Ethereum. Read →
Our ERC-8004 index on Base and Ethereum shows only a few thousand of the registered total actually answer a request. Per-chain registered-vs-live figures corroborated by independent arXiv research. The registry count is the wrong number. Read →
A worked example on agent 19353: what the free per-agent profile answers, what the free graph teaser shows, and what the paid peers and graph endpoints add. The ten closest peer agents and the full inter-agent payment network, in one call. Read →
The six on-chain and off-chain signals that separate a real, usable ERC-8004 AI agent from a paper registration — identity, Sybil-adjusted ReputationRegistry feedback, x402 and settlement history, cross-chain presence, and live reachability. Read →
Primary datasets · refreshed daily · CC BY 4.0
x402 Bazaar Market Map (JSON · CSV) · Price census · Paid-but-unrated join · Daily catalog time series · x402 Bazaar discovery census (2026-10-05) · Arbitrum ERC-8004 cohort census (2026-10-07).