“Paid” means three different things

Ask how many ERC-8004 agents have been paid and you can get an answer in the tens of thousands or in the tens. Both can be correct. They measure different things.

Published 24 October 2026 · figures as of 24 October 2026 unless a number updates live on the page

Three meanings, three counts

Term	What it shows	Count
Owner wallet received payments	The wallet that owns the agent received any ETH or USDC, from anyone	21,307 agents
Paid to the agent's own address	Money arrived at a payment address the agent declares as its own	18 agents
Reviews from paid jobs	The agent has on-chain reviews that point to a paid job	51 agents

Across 26,787 indexed agents on Base and Ethereum, as of 24 October 2026.

1. Owner wallet received payments

This is the widest measure. It is true when the wallet that owns the agent has received at least one ETH or USDC transfer. About 80% of indexed agents pass it. It is easy to compute, which is why it shows up in many dashboards as “paid”.

The problem is that one wallet can own many agents, and it does other things too. Of the agents whose owner wallet received money, three in four share that wallet with at least one other agent. The largest single owner wallet in our index holds 8,922 agent registrations. Any transfer to that wallet, whether income, a refund, an airdrop or the owner topping up, makes all 8,922 look “paid”. Count agents this way and one busy wallet can add thousands to an ecosystem's paid-agent total.

So we show this as Owner wallet received payments. It is useful context about the operator. It is not proof that this agent earned anything.

2. Paid to the agent's own address

This is the narrow measure. It needs the agent to declare a payment address that is its own: not its owner's wallet and not shared with sibling agents. We then look for money arriving at that address.

Few agents declare such an address, so few can be checked. As of 24 October 2026, 20 agents qualify and 18 of them show incoming payments: about $1,729 in USDC and 3.41 ETH in total. Most of that money went to a small number of agents. This count is a floor, not a ceiling. An agent that is paid into its owner's wallet cannot be told apart from one that is not.

3. Reviews from paid jobs

ERC-8004 also has a reputation registry where anyone can leave on-chain feedback on an agent. Some of that feedback points to a specific paid job, for example a job on the Virtuals agent marketplace. We count an agent here when it has at least one such review.

51 agents meet this, with 1,003 reviews from 117 reviewers. This shows that a job was done and reviewed. It does not show where the money went or that the work was good. The list is at /commerce-backed-agents.

What our API returns

Every agent record in our API now carries three fields, so you can choose the meaning you need:

payments_to_owner_wallet: true when the owner wallet received ETH or USDC.
payments_to_agent_address: true or false when the agent has its own address we could check; empty when it has none.
payment_attribution: agent, operator or none, saying where the payments we saw arrived.

The older field payments_received means the same as payments_to_owner_wallet. It is deprecated and will be removed on 7 November 2026. Full definitions are in the glossary.

How to read a claim that agents were paid

Ask which address was checked: the owner's wallet, or the agent's own.
Ask how many agents share that wallet.
Treat reviews from paid jobs as evidence of work done, not of income.

One in five ERC-8004 agents comes from eight platforms · Advertising x402 is not the same as being payable · What “last checked” should mean for an agent endpoint