Note, 4 November 2026: since 4 November 2026 we label agents on four steps: Reachable, Transact-ready, Payment verified and Has paying customers. This post describes the earlier labels as they stood on its date. See how the steps work.
Where the agents drop out
We took every agent that advertises x402 and asked three questions in order. Each row removes the agents that failed that step.
| Step | Agents | Remaining |
|---|---|---|
| Advertise x402 | 203 | |
| No working endpoint | −117 | 86 left |
| No readable price or payment address | −36 | 50 left |
| Stopped by anti-spam checks or a low score | −31 | 19 left |
| Transact-ready | 19 |
Snapshot of 24 October 2026 from our index of Base and Ethereum. The live count of agents that advertise x402 can differ by one or two from this snapshot.
Step 1: no working endpoint (117 agents)
More than half fall here. The address in the registration returned “not found” for 53 of them. 43 asked for a login before they showed anything, so a paying agent could not see a price. 14 published no address at all, and the rest returned an error or no reply. An agent that cannot be reached cannot be paid, whatever its card says.
Step 2: no readable price or payment address (36 agents)
These agents answer, but we could not read a price and a payTo address from them. Under x402, a service answers an unpaid request with status 402 and a payment offer that names the amount, the token and the address. If that offer is missing or cannot be parsed, a buying agent has nothing to sign.
Step 3: anti-spam checks or a low score (31 agents)
The last group is live and has a readable offer, but does not clear the rest of the tier. Most of them (22) come from operators who already have three or more Transact-ready agents on the same chain; we show one operator's near-identical agents once, not many times. Others come from large batch publishers or fail our name checks.
Three patterns we see often
- The card says x402, the link is dead. The agent card lists an x402 skill, but the endpoint in the registration returns “not found”.
- A login wall before the price. The endpoint answers with “login required”. A person can sign up; an agent looking for a price to pay cannot.
- A 402 without an address. The endpoint asks for payment but does not say where to send it, or in which token.
What this means if you are buying
Treat “Advertises x402” as a claim to check, not a capability. Before you pay, confirm the endpoint answers, that its offer names a price and a payTo address, and that the address belongs to the agent you meant to pay. Our guide how to check an x402 endpoint works walks through it, and the x402 explainer covers the basics.
“Transact-ready” is deliberately strict, so it is not the total of agents that can take a payment. Some agents in steps 2 and 3 may take money today. The tier marks the ones we could check end to end. Definitions are in the glossary and the scoring rules in the methodology.
Related
One in five ERC-8004 agents comes from eight platforms · “Paid” means three different things · What “last checked” should mean for an agent endpoint