State-of-ERC-8004 reports, methodology notes, and worked examples from our live index of every ERC-8004 agent on Base and Ethereum. https://onchainagentintel.io/feed.xml 2026-09-05T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/ (c) On-Chain Agent Intel tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-09-05:/blog/x402-catalog-flat-paid-set-growing-2026-09 2026-09-05T00:00:00Z 2026-09-05T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

The x402 endpoint market has two shapes at once, and read together they explain more than either alone. The Coinbase CDP Bazaar — the largest single public x402 discovery catalog on Base — is not accumulating items on net over the ~20-day rolling-window span the in-repo daily snapshot archive supports. The subset that has actually crossed the ≥5-distinct-paying-wallets-in-30-days bar is growing much faster than the catalog: 563 → 727 endpoints (+29.13%), with 72.82% of the earlier cohort persisting into the current window and 317 net new entrants across the 5-payer bar. Persistence is the other half of the same shape: 10 of 10 earlier top-10 endpoints by 30-day calls are still earning; 7 of 10 remain in the current top-10; their share of measured calls fell 54.76% → 39.82% (−14.94 pp) as demand fanned out to new entrants. Reference case: x402.tavily.com/search dropped from 25,073 to 1,899 calls (−92.43%) yet remains in the earning set. The two 30-day rolling windows overlap by roughly 10 days, so this is not a 30-day-apart delta and no figure here can be re-quoted as a permanent number. SAMPLE (CDP Bazaar catalog rows), not POPULATION; a 402 is a payment challenge, never a buyer; per-publisher dedup capped at 50 and disclosed on-page. CC BY 4.0.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-09-04:/blog/state-of-erc-8004-2026-09 2026-09-04T00:00:00Z 2026-09-04T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

Two months after Report 05, the ERC-8004 identity registry on Base and Ethereum has grown, its publisher tail has hardened around a small number of big minters, and the gap between a raw registry mint and a payable counterparty is now visible in four distinct on-chain cohorts we measure separately: registered, signposted with a discoverable agent card, resolvable to a usable card body, and commerce-backed. The Ethereum registry has emitted a full block-range count of raw Transfer(from=0x0) mints as of the last full census (snapshot date on-page) — a raw-registration total, never an agent count; a majority carry a populated tokenURI, far fewer resolve to a usable agent card. A fresh 600-per-chain resolvability sample bounds the middle layer (Base pooled usable-card ~56%, Ethereum ~71%, pooled ~64%; 95% CIs on-page, sample not census). The signpost gap is 5.93% of indexed registrations publishing a discoverable /.well-known/agent-card.json (20.03% of endpoint-live registrations). Reputation is Base-heavy by construction (Ethereum tail queued behind Alchemy quota) and the commerce-backed cohort — real got-paid rows — remains a small filtered slice. The Solana 8004-solana program is reported separately as a non-ERC-8004 registry; raw registration count is disclosed with the creator-concentration histogram in the same paragraph, and no resolvability claim is made about the Solana rows. Per-publisher dedup cap is stated on-page. CC BY 4.0.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-09-04:/blog/what-x402-trust-scores-actually-measure 2026-09-04T00:00:00Z 2026-09-04T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

A buyer facing an unknown x402 endpoint has four different questions; the public scoring surfaces each answer a different one. Names the predicate ladder every credible surface sits on: advertised (a URL somebody published), answers a probe (Agents Trust measures this at 138k-URL scale on their landing page; ForgeMesh's own August census reports 1 in 4 x402 Bazaar sellers failed a probe-based sale-completion check, predicate = envelope + reachability + paywall-fires), was actually paid (x402.fuchss.app publishes per-endpoint 30d settlements, distinct payers, USDC volume, at payTo-wallet level, with the acknowledged caveat that settlement figures are wallet-level, not endpoint-specific, and their footer scope statement that they probe and observe but do not verify delivery-after-payment), counterparty is a registry-owned identity (our ERC-8004 join: 14,338 earning Base x402 endpoints -> 1,291 (9.0%) ERC-8004-owned -> 26 distinct pay_tos, top publisher 67.2%, 4 with any feedback, 0 commerce-backed; per-publisher dedup capped at 50, disclosed on-page). Nobody else joins the paid-endpoint cohort to on-chain ERC-8004 identity. Layer 5 -- delivered after payment -- is not measured by anybody today, including us. x402station is marked UNDETERMINED at capture (0 services / 0 transactions / 0.0% reliability, so the methodology narrative could not be inspected). A 402 is a payment CHALLENGE, never a buyer. Every surface named is a complementary layer at a different question, never anyone's error. CC BY 4.0.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-09-03:/blog/how-to-vet-an-x402-endpoint 2026-09-03T00:00:00Z 2026-09-03T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

First buyer-intent piece in the /blog cluster. You are about to pay an unknown x402 endpoint; here is the checklist we run against public data before we send money. Five checks, each backed by one of our live numbers: has anyone been charged at this endpoint at all (cohort ladder at >=1, >=5, >=10, >=100 unique payers in 30 days, rendered live from the same CDP Bazaar snapshot the market map uses); is the endpoint diffuse or concentrated (exclusive payer-count bucket distribution); does the pay_to walk back to a registry-owned identity (the ERC-8004 x x402 ownership join dated 2026-09-01, endpoint AND publisher level in the same paragraph, with the per-publisher dedup cap of 50 disclosed on-page); is the publisher one endpoint or fifty; does any of it carry commerce-backed reputation. Endpoints with a missing or non-numeric l30DaysUniquePayers field are excluded from every threshold and bucket -- the exclusion note is on-page. Snapshot timestamp is on-page and every 30-day cohort figure is a rolling window that moves with each snapshot; do not read them as permanent numbers. A 402 is a payment CHALLENGE, never a buyer. Probe-liveness measurement is framed as a genuinely useful, complementary layer -- the sibling piece at /blog/probe-vs-paid does the layer contrast in depth. CC BY 4.0.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-09-03:/blog/probe-vs-paid 2026-09-03T00:00:00Z 2026-09-03T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

There are three different questions you can ask about an agent endpoint, and the ecosystem currently answers them at three different depths. Is it advertised (a URL somebody published)? Does it answer a probe (it returns a payment challenge when asked)? Was it ever actually PAID, by whom, and does the counterparty walk back to a registry-owned identity? Layer 2 is genuinely useful liveness work -- Agents Trust measures it at 138k-URL scale on their landing page (advertised -> ever answered a probe -> callable now, funnel quoted verbatim with the attribution their page allows: fetched 2026-09-03; no snapshot date given). Layer 3 is a strictly narrower question, and it is the layer we measure: 14,338 earning Base x402 endpoints -> 1,291 ERC-8004-owned -> 9 rated -> 0 commerce-backed, with the publisher-level cut co-located in the same paragraph (26 distinct pay_tos, top one 67.2%, 4 rated, 0 commerce-backed; per-publisher dedup capped at 50, disclosed on-page). A 402 is a payment CHALLENGE, never a buyer. Nobody else joins the paid-endpoint cohort to on-chain ERC-8004 identity. CC BY 4.0.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-09-03:/blog/x402-live-population-2026-09 2026-09-03T00:00:00Z 2026-09-03T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

Front-door piece for the x402 content cluster. Every public number circulating for the x402 ecosystem is an estimate, projection, or press figure; this is the reference cut we measure daily from the same live CDP Bazaar snapshot the market map, price census, Report 07 and Report 10 render from. CATALOG != PRICED != EARNING kept strictly separate: total indexed endpoints, priced subset with a median call cost that refutes the circulating ~$0.30 average, earning subset by CDP's own l30DaysUniquePayers >= 1 field. Payer- and call-weighted concentration side by side. ERC-8004 ownership join at BOTH endpoint and publisher level in one section (2026-09-01 dated), including the top-publisher share and the distinct-pay_tos with any feedback and commerce-backed counts. Names what the population does not carry — reputation, commerce-backing (with the Virtuals ACP boundary condition explanation co-located so the 0 does not read as a data bug), walkable endpoint identity. Standing discipline: l30DaysTotalCalls is a request count not settled USDC value; a 402 is a payment CHALLENGE not a buyer; the CDP Bazaar is one Base-weighted discovery source. CC BY 4.0.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-09-03:/blog/x402-call-weighted-concentration-2026-09 2026-09-03T00:00:00Z 2026-09-03T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

Editorial companion to the call-weighted block that landed on /x402-bazaar-market-map in task 0423. Report 07 counted ENDPOINTS. Report 10 counts CALLS. Same live CDP Bazaar snapshot, opposite picture. The >=5-unique-payer cohort is a small share of indexed endpoints (with both a payer and a call count) but carries the overwhelming majority of indexed 30-day requests; the exactly-1-payer cohort inverts the picture and the MEDIAN 30-day call count for that cohort is 1 -- the typical x402 endpoint has been touched about once in thirty days. Every figure computed at build time from the same snapshot the live market-map concentration block and the JSON export render from, via the same _bazaar_call_weighted_concentration helper -- the page and the live surfaces cannot drift. Standing discipline: l30DaysTotalCalls is a request count, not settled USDC value (never 'volume' unqualified); a 1-payer endpoint is indistinguishable from self-dealing from on-chain data alone; the CDP Bazaar catalog is one Base-weighted x402 discovery source, and both denominators are conditional on being indexed by CDP. CC BY 4.0.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-09-02:/blog/x402-catalog-churn-2026-09 2026-09-02T00:00:00Z 2026-09-02T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

Editorial interpretation layer for the 7th citable dataset at /is-the-x402-market-growing. Over 19 UTC days (2026-08-15 to 2026-09-02), the public Coinbase CDP x402 Bazaar catalog's item count moved by a value indistinguishable from zero while distinct hosts grew about 9% and the trough-to-peak intra-window swing was large. That shape is CHURN, not accumulation -- endpoints are being replaced, not added on net. Standing discipline: CATALOG != PRICED != EARNING; do not infer demand from catalog size. One source (the public Coinbase CDP Bazaar), not an ecosystem census. Every figure computed at build time from the daily catalog series cache; CC BY 4.0.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-08-16:/blog/google-ap2-agent-payments-trust-gap 2026-08-16T00:00:00Z 2026-08-16T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

Google announced the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) on 2025-09-16 as an open protocol for agent-led payments with 60+ launch partners including Coinbase, Mastercard, PayPal, Adyen, and Mysten Labs, and an Apache-2.0 reference implementation. AP2 addresses three pillars in Google's own words — Authorization, Authenticity, and Accountability — via cryptographically-signed Mandates backed by Verifiable Credentials, with explicit x402 sample paths in the spec repo. It authenticates the transaction. It does not score the counterparty agent. That is the second commoditising payments rail arriving under the same missing trust layer this year, three weeks after Cloudflare Wallets. Category framing pegged to our own measured data — the 6.5% ERC-8004 → agent-card signpost gap (1,604 of 24,835 indexed registrations, live dataset), the 97.9% top-10 concentration on the x402 demand side (423 measured services), and Imperial College's arXiv:2606.26028 measurement that the ReputationRegistry cannot function as a trust signal — with a fair-comparison table of what AP2's Mandates do attest and what a counterparty-quality layer on top of them still has to prove.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-08-16:/blog/who-do-agents-pay-cloudflare-wallets-2026-08 2026-08-16T00:00:00Z 2026-08-16T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

Cloudflare's Wallets announcement (2026-08-04) gives AI agents a cloudflare.pay identity, a spending cap, and x402 stablecoin micropayments — the buyer-side half of the internet-native payments stack the Linux Foundation put under a formal x402 Foundation on 2026-07-14. Rails are commoditising. The trust filter is not. Mainstream financial press is now reporting x402 settlement volume down ~93% year-to-date while payment count keeps climbing — a paradox that only resolves one way: the scarce good is knowing which counterparty is real. Our own measured numbers explain why. Only 1,604 of 24,835 indexed ERC-8004 registrations (6.5%) publish a discoverable agent-card, and 97.9% of demand-side x402 settlement volume across 423 measured services concentrates in the top ten. cloudflare.pay attests wallet ownership and organizational binding. ERC-8004 attests on-chain identity, feedback, and — through commerce-backed reputation — real got-paid history. Both are useful. Neither, on its own, tells you which of the newly-walleted agents is worth paying.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-08-16:/blog/the-erc-8004-signpost-gap 2026-08-16T00:00:00Z 2026-08-16T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

Measured 2026-08-16: of 24,835 indexed Base + Ethereum ERC-8004 registrations, only 1,604 (6.5%) publish a discoverable /.well-known/agent-card.json — the standard A2A capability manifest an autonomous discovery client needs to walk from the on-chain identity to a payable endpoint. Hop-by-hop traversal audit over seven live agents shows H1 (registry read), H2 (URI resolve) and H5 (V2 402 paywall shape) all 7/7 PASS; H3 (agent-card discovery) is the single binding hop. Includes concrete named examples of both the failure (ClawFresh agentId 20992 on Base, Name Whisper agentId 29402 on Ethereum) and the fix (Tavily Search 35179, OnchainExpat 23922, Lunairefine 31786, Buyer 32965), plus a copy-pasteable four-field ERC-8004 v1 reference implementation drawn from three conformant agents in the sample. We were in the 93.5% at time of measurement; the same-day fix that moved /agent.json into strict conformance is documented inline.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-08-16:/blog/erc-8257-agent-tool-registry-coverage 2026-08-16T00:00:00Z 2026-08-16T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

OpenSea shipped ERC-8257 (Agent Tool Registry) as a Draft EIP on 2026-04-17: a permissionless on-chain registry where AI-agent tools publish pricing and agents auto-discover and pay. Live on Ethereum mainnet and Base (roughly 76 tools indexed as of mid-2026, per QuickNode's secondary-source explainer). The standard assumes three neighbouring layers we already ship in production — ERC-8004 identity, x402 payments, and MCP capability discovery — so registering our agent 19353 is bookkeeping rather than protocol work. Honest field comparison against agents-trust.ai (Agentscan), which is running close positioning with an ERC-8004 registry, a dedicated /erc8257/ page, credential-free /submit, and a Trust API listed as 'soon.' Our differentiator is commerce-backed reputation — real got-paid rows, not bot rows. On-chain registration is queued at Row 30 of JASON-ACTION-QUEUE.md pending Jason sign-off.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-08-15:/blog/the-trust-layer-the-protocols-assume-is-already-there 2026-08-15T00:00:00Z 2026-08-15T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

A June 2026 protocol-governance survey (arXiv:2606.31498, Kang & Diponegoro, DoiT International) explicitly scopes reputation out of its six-dimension governance taxonomy on the grounds it is already addressed by ERC-8004. An independent empirical study (arXiv:2606.26028, Imperial College London) measures that same registry and finds it cannot function as a trust signal. Not strictly contradictory — one is a taxonomy scoping decision, the other a measurement of deployed state — but read side by side the honest framing is 'the assumption is reasonable on paper and false on chain.' Includes the AWS Bedrock AgentCore observation (GA in 15 regions, no trust scoring or reputation) as independent confirmation from the largest cloud vendor that the trust layer is unbuilt. Cross-links to the sibling x402-concentration and Imperial-College reconciliation posts as the payments-side and identity-side counterparts.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-08-15:/blog/x402-payment-concentration-the-economy-is-ten-services 2026-08-15T00:00:00Z 2026-08-16T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

Two whole-catalog measurements of the x402 agent-payments economy — ours from the supply side (every paid endpoint in Coinbase's public CDP Bazaar) and x402-list.com's from the demand side (a public /api/v1/stats endpoint over 423 measured services) — converge on the same shape. A large listing surface, a tiny paying cohort. In a market this concentrated, a directory of agents is close to worthless and a trust filter is the product. Third-party figures are frozen citations as measured 2026-08-15 from x402-list.com/api/v1/stats; both predicate definitions stated explicitly side by side. Closes the loop with a third independent source: Imperial College's ERC-8004 study (arXiv:2606.26028) reaches the same conclusion from the identity-registry side.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-08-15:/blog/erc-8004-trust-academic-study-vs-live-data 2026-08-15T00:00:00Z 2026-08-15T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

Independent academic work (arXiv 2606.26028, Imperial College London, CC BY 4.0) finds that most ERC-8004 registrations are placeholders and the ReputationRegistry cannot function as a trust signal. Their data froze on 2026-05-13. This post reconciles their frozen May baseline against our live August index, with both predicate definitions stated explicitly side by side. Direction and Base-vs-Ethereum ordering match; BNB remains the weakest of the three chains under both teams' predicates; commerce-backed reputation is the architectural fix for the paper's central complaint about the registry.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-08-15:/blog/x402-demand-concentration-2026-08 2026-08-15T00:00:00Z 2026-08-15T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

Dated whole-catalog measurement of Coinbase's public x402 Bazaar. Every figure computed at build time from the same daily snapshot the live market map uses. The strong-filter cohort (>=5 unique payers in 30 days) is a small minority of the full indexed catalog -- listing is not demand. Includes methodology, an honest-correction note, and a citation block under CC BY 4.0.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-08-13:/blog/x402-agent-intel-market-map-2026-08 2026-08-13T00:00:00Z 2026-08-13T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

Original data. We downloaded and scanned the entire Coinbase x402 Bazaar catalog to map the agent-intelligence market: who sells ERC-8004 / agent reputation, at what price, and how little anyone is buying yet. At least five direct competitors already ship reputation endpoints; nobody has broken out. First-mover positioning still available. Snapshot as of 13 August 2026.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-07-31:/blog/state-of-erc-8004-2026-07-operational-readiness 2026-07-31T00:00:00Z 2026-07-31T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

Independent research (arXiv 2606.12128) and core Ethereum infra (The Graph, x402, ERC-8004) are converging on the same question: how many registered ERC-8004 agents are actually operational? Our commerce-backed cohort and per-chain live-rate audit are the on-chain dataset that answers it.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-07-30:/blog/why-we-went-all-ethereum-2026-07 2026-07-30T00:00:00Z 2026-07-30T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

Biggest index is a vanity metric. Live plus commerce-backed is what matters. The chain-quality numbers, the placeholder tail, and the zero commerce-backed count that made cutting BNB the obvious call -- and the all-Ethereum posture (Base + Ethereum today, Arbitrum next) going forward.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-07-22:/blog/state-of-erc-8004-2026-07-commerce-backed 2026-07-22T00:00:00Z 2026-07-22T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

The small cohort of ERC-8004 agents whose ReputationRegistry rows tie back to real, paid on-chain jobs (ERC-8183 / Virtuals ACP) -- set alongside the total registered set and the raw feedback-event count so the shape of the gap is legible. The one trust signal a bulk-mint farm cannot cheaply produce.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-07-17:/blog/erc-8004-placeholders-and-fake-reputation 2026-07-17T00:00:00Z 2026-07-17T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

Our own index of roughly 95,000 ERC-8004 agents on Base, Ethereum, and BNB Chain. Only a few thousand actually answer a request. Per-chain registered-vs-live figures pulled live from our public stats endpoint, with independent research (arXiv:2606.26028) corroborating the shape. Why the registry counts are the wrong number to shop by, and what a real trust filter looks like.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-07-07:/blog/mapping-agent-relationships-onchain 2026-07-07T00:00:00Z 2026-07-07T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

A worked example on agent base/19353: what the free per-agent profile answers, what the free 200-node graph teaser shows, and what the paid /v1/intel/peers/{agent_id} and /v1/intel/graph endpoints add -- the ten closest peer agents by capability overlap, and the full inter-agent payment network in one call.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-07-06:/blog/how-to-verify-an-erc-8004-agent 2026-07-06T00:00:00Z 2026-07-06T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

The six on-chain and off-chain signals that separate a real, usable ERC-8004 AI agent from a paper registration -- identity, ReputationRegistry feedback (Sybil-adjusted), x402 and settlement history, cross-chain presence, and live reachability. Vendor-neutral checklist you can apply on any chain.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-07-05:/blog/state-of-erc-8004-2026-07 2026-07-05T00:00:00Z 2026-07-05T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

Five weeks on: the index is bigger, the BNB coverage moat has widened, and almost none of Report 01's headline agents are still Transact-ready. What the current readiness distribution tells us about which agents actually work.

tag:onchainagentintel.io,2026-06-01:/blog/state-of-erc-8004-2026-05 2026-06-01T00:00:00Z 2026-06-01T00:00:00Z On-Chain Agent Intel https://onchainagentintel.io/

The inaugural census of the ERC-8004 agent economy -- the MCP and OpenAPI capability layers, owner identity, the factory-cluster long tail, and what reachability tells us about which agents actually matter.