A NAVISTRI report, 13 October 2026
Who pays x402 sellers?
We traced 30 days of USDC payments on Base to every seller listed in Coinbase’s x402 Bazaar: 1,495 seller wallets, 481,916 payments, $13,099.
At least 1 in 5 dollars
that x402 sellers took in on Base came back from wallets the sellers had funded themselves.22.7% of the money, $2,977. It is a floor: money routed through an exchange can’t be traced on-chain.
Where every $100 came from
Share of all USDC paid to Bazaar sellers on Base in 30 days, by who paid it.
- ≥ $23Sellers’ own money
- $32Heavy buyers, outside money
- $44Everyone else
- $1.3Auditors
Show as a table
| Who paid | Of every $100 | In 30 days |
|---|---|---|
| Sellers’ own money | ≥ $23 | $2,977 |
| Heavy buyers, outside money | $32 | $4,156 |
| Everyone else | $44 | $5,797 |
| Auditors | $1.3 | $169 |
Three more things in the data
- 74%of all sellers that got paid were paid by a single auditor, vet402. Auditors as a whole brought 1.3% of the money.
- 53%of the money went to 10 sellers out of 1,434.
- 349 of 475wallets that paid one seller 100+ times were funded by that seller or shared one sponsor with others like them.
What it means
- Payer counts and volume overstate agent demand. A buyer that the seller funded is a seller paying itself. Count buyers that come back on different days with their own money.
- Not every loop is fraud. A seller’s own website can pay its own API on behalf of human users. It is a real product, but it isn’t agents buying.
- Auditors are everywhere and pay almost nothing. Their checks barely move volume, but they keep some listings alive: 31 sellers got money only from auditors, and Coinbase removes a listing after 30 days without a payment.
How we measured
- Sellers: every pay-to wallet that takes USDC on Base in the Coinbase x402 Bazaar discovery API, snapshot of 2026-10-13.
- Payments: every USDC transfer of $1 or less to those wallets in the 30 days to 2026-10-13, read with Alchemy’s transfers API. For 15 very busy sellers we read the latest 20,000 transfers.
- Auditors: vet402’s buyer wallets, found through the transaction hashes it publishes, plus any wallet that paid 20+ sellers and never came back to one on a second day. The result barely changes at 10 or 50.
- Sellers’ own money: wallets that paid one seller 100+ times and were funded by that seller, directly or through an address the seller paid, or that share one sponsor with two or more such wallets. In 259 of 266 direct cases the seller’s transfer came before the wallet’s first payment, so these are not refunds.
- Limits: Base only. Exchange-funded farms look like outside money, so the real share is higher.
Data
The aggregated numbers behind this page: data.json. We don’t publish seller names or addresses. The method is above, and the code is available on request.