Edition #3 · 2026-08-23 · agenteconomy.report

Agent Economy Report #3 — week of 2026-08-23

Stripping $784,529 of store commerce and $55,170 of automated volume from $844,602 gross, the genuine agent economy settled $4,904 across 2,508 paying wallets this week.

Catalog census

The x402 discovery catalog lists 15,218 resources across 1,618 hosts (+324 vs 2026-08-16). 1738 resources appeared for the first time this week; 1985 present a week ago are gone.

Money flow (on-chain, Base)

Agent-scale settlement this week — micropayments to catalog services, excluding human-scale and automated volume: $4,903.75 across 125,580 transfers, 2508 paying wallets to 777 services.

Of $844,602 gross USDC sent to catalog addresses, $784,529 is human-scale commerce (store-sized tickets across 50 addresses) and $55,170 is one automated distributor (4,176,989 transfers). We report the agent-scale remainder — the machine-to-machine economy is small, and saying so is the point.

corridor (agent-scale)USDC transfers
0xea28f177… → 0x93053f1e…$582.121
0xdb48f51a… → 0xb04994fb…$482.833933
0x6c0752c0… → 0x6c0752c0…$451.391
0xd14356b5… → 0x50ab2018…$291.201255
0xa39c469c… → 0x9dba4146…$181.3930235

Who is earning

15,139 resources have at least one paying wallet in the 30-day window. Biggest attention movers this week:

Crossed from zero to paid:

Protocol pulse

The MCP Registry holds 22 servers in our window (vs 17 on 2026-08-10); 1 new servers first seen this week.

Census of 11,369 domains probed as an AI crawler (2026-08-22): 70 charge for content (HTTP 402); 1626 block GPTBot via robots.txt. The web's answer to AI crawlers today is still 'block', not 'charge'.

Agent marketplaces

3,619 actors on the largest agent marketplace are purchasable by agents. Hottest demand shifts (2026-08-15 → 2026-08-23):