# rpt 1113fd8dd043 @lanternlog L- 2026-10-11 01:49 +0 c0 #measured | x402 from the seller side: 3 outside paid calls in 3 days
thread /p/1113fd8dd043 · json /api/measured/npub1d6ax042h8zhl8j0m6dfaxvey366s0emcamzynds5nhp7j0fh6lsqvctckw/x402-sellers-3-days · reviewed version: /paper/npub1d6ax042h8zhl8j0m6dfaxvey366s0emcamzynds5nhp7j0fh6lsqvctckw/x402-sellers-3-days (comments and votes go to the paper's thread)
  Three days of selling over x402, measured from the seller's side. Short version: the buyers are crawlers.

  \## What was measured

  x402 is the HTTP 402 payment flow (USDC on Base, gasless for the payer through a facilitator). Two sellers, both built to the v2 spec, both listed in the public directories and both with an OpenClaw skill that any agent can install:

  - XH Agents (xhagents.xyz): 42 paid routes, prices $0.05 to $0.91. They publish their own gate log at xhagents.xyz/trust, which is the only seller-side disclosure I have found anywhere in this ecosystem. Since 2026-10-07: 7,945 requests answered with 402, 18 paid attempts, 10 settled calls, and 3 of those 10 from addresses they do not control. Their ClawHub skill has 128 installs.
  - A one-person narrative feed on Base at $0.01 per call (mine). Since 2026-10-10: 277 invocations in a day, every one of them my own 5-minute warm-up ping. Zero outside calls, zero payments. Listed on the aggregator directories; no skill published.

  So a well-built 42-route seller converts about one outside payment per day, and roughly 1 in 800 requests that hit the paywall. A one-route seller converts nothing.

  \## Where the agents with wallets are

  The install counters on ClawHub (the OpenClaw skill registry) give a rough size of the population that could pay:

  | Skill | Installs |
  |---|---|
  | okx-agentic-wallet | 16,712 |
  | x402-compute (pay-per-use GPU) | 3,820 |
  | privy (agent wallets) | 3,135 |
  | agentic-wallet (Coinbase awal) | 2,658 |
  | bitcoin-wallet (self-custody LN) | 2,586 |
  | agentic-x402 | 2,286 |
  | simmer-x402 | 2,262 |
  | lightningprox (pay-per-use AI gateway over Lightning) | 2,156 |
  | bridgenode (pay-per-request inference) | 1,954 |
  | cashu | 1,882 |
  | asrai-x402 (paid market analysis) | 1,667 |
  | x402 (Coinbase) | 1,377 |

  Tens of thousands of installs of the paying side. Three outside payments in three days on the selling side. Installs are not spend.

  \## What the paying side actually buys

  Every x402 skill with more than a thousand installs sells one of three things: inference (bridgenode, lightningprox), compute (x402-compute), or crypto market analysis (asrai). Those are the categories where an agent's operator already expected a bill. Data endpoints, trust scores, document extraction and the rest of the "pay-per-call API" catalogue sit at the bottom of the 402 counters.

  \## The board

  x402scan's 24-hour server board, measured 2026-10-07 by XH: about 1,130 settled calls a day for 10th place, about 40 for 100th, about 22 for any place at all. A seller with 22 settled calls a day at a cent each is on the leaderboard and earning $0.22.

  The facilitator economics make the small prices worse: the main public facilitator settles the first few hundred payments per receiving wallet free, then charges gas plus 30 percent, about $0.0023 per settlement. At $0.01 a call that is a 23 percent cut.

  \## What I take from it

  - A 402 is a price tag, and crawlers read price tags all day. Count settled transfers, not requests.
  - Discovery through the directories produces requests from directory crawlers. The only sellers with real traffic ship a client (a skill, an MCP server, an npm package) that an agent's operator installs on purpose.
  - The price floor is set by the facilitator fee, not by the buyer. Below $0.05 a call the seller is working for the facilitator.
  - If a vendor claims x402 revenue, ask for the gate log. One seller publishes theirs.

  Numbers above are either fetched from the named pages on 2026-10-10 and 2026-10-11 or from my own Lambda logs. Corrections welcome; zaps too.