x402 Payability Observatory — week 2026-W43
How much of the x402 surface an agent can actually pay, and why the rest can't. Every endpoint Settled tracks is probed unpaid on the verb its listing declares and, when that fails, on the other verb; payees are checked on Base; a scout wallet buys from every seller listed up to $0.25 in turn, for real. Generated 2026-10-22 15:17 UTC · JSON · sample CSV (CC BY 4.0) · signed daily snapshot
Payability
| Verdict | Endpoints | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
payable | 71,698 | valid 402 quote on the verb that answers; nothing paid yet |
unreachable | 5,424 | no HTTP answer |
cannot_pay_either_verb | 5,271 | neither GET nor POST yields a 402 or a 2xx |
unknown | 2,644 | not established yet |
delivered | 1,994 | paid and delivered — a real payment came back with a real response |
free | 340 | 2xx without a paywall |
malformed_402 | 318 | answers 402 but the quote is malformed |
auth_gated | 133 | 401/403 before any payment |
unpriced | 16 | valid 402 but no accept we can price |
Scout (real payments)
706 payments this week, $20.23 spent. 664 came back with content (94.1%); 431 matched their listing and 29 did not. Every purchase, with its transaction. 3,255 payee addresses checked on Base; 213 had never been used.
By listed price
| Listed price | Sellers bought this week | Purchases | Spent | Delivered | Paid, nothing back | Sellers on hold |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| up to $0.01 | 388 of 1,582 | 376 | $2.73 | 96% | 14 | 5 |
| $0.01 to $0.05 | 240 of 366 | 293 | $9.22 | 92.8% | 19 | 2 |
| $0.05 to $0.25 | 16 of 176 | 16 | $1.63 | 87.5% | 2 | 0 |
| $0.25 to $1.00 | 16 of 87 | 17 | $6.66 | 76.5% | 3 | 0 |
A seller is a payTo wallet, counted in the tier of its cheapest payable endpoint; purchases count at the listed price of what was bought. The scout buys each seller's cheapest endpoint in turn: sellers up to $0.25 at most once a week, and sellers whose endpoints all cost more (up to $1.00) at most once every 60 days, a few rows a run from a daily allowance of their own. Delivered: content came back. Paid, nothing back: the scout paid and got nothing usable. On hold: that happened twice in 30 days across more than half of the endpoints the scout bought from the seller, so the scout stopped buying and /v1/preflight answers avoid until a purchase delivers.
Biggest live hosts
| Host | Live | Payable |
|---|---|---|
| market.datapackvibe.com | 21,848 | 21,848 |
| dev.intel.rallylive.ca | 1,576 | 1,583 |
| saylorinnovations.com | 1,557 | 1,569 |
| monitor.intel.rallylive.ca | 1,337 | 1,344 |
| agentshelf.syntexa.ch | 1,227 | 1,235 |
| www.mahastrategies.com | 1,151 | 1,155 |
| data.intel.rallylive.ca | 1,134 | 1,142 |
| ip.intel.rallylive.ca | 1,070 | 1,073 |
The thread
x402 Payability Observatory · Oct 15–22 87,838 endpoints tracked, 85,194 probed unpaid (GET, then POST if needed): • 73,692 payable (86.5% of probed) · +17,132 new · 8,318 went dark Data (CC BY): settled.tools/observatory
2/ Why the rest can't be paid (every endpoint is tried on GET and POST before it is written off): unreachable: 5,424 pays on neither verb: 5,271 free (no paywall): 340 malformed 402: 318 auth-gated: 133 unpriced: 16
3/ Scout: 706 real USDC payments to 678 sellers this week, 664 delivered content (94.1%), 431 matched their listing, 29 did not, $20.23 spent. 2,037 endpoints carry a paid-and-delivered verdict.
4/ 3,683 live hosts · $8,861 in x402 payments reached 664 seller wallets, Oct 15–21 (ledger: Sep 17–Oct 22, 2,323 indexed sellers). The biggest hosts: market.datapackvibe.com: 21,848 live, 21,848 payable dev.intel.rallylive.ca: 1,576 live, 1,583 payable
5/ Every verdict is EIP-191 signed and the whole index is snapshotted daily, hash-chained (verify at /v1/verify, /v1/snapshots). Sample CSV: CC BY 4.0. Other measurers: publish your verdicts for the same sample and let's compare where we disagree — reply. Not financial advice.
Method and license
Liveness: an unpaid request with Accept: application/json on the declared verb, then the other verb if that one returned neither 402 nor 2xx; three consistent failures before a terminal status, except that a host with no successful probe for 6 hours has all its endpoints marked dead at once (flag host_down) until one answers again. Payability derives from the damped status plus the latest quote. Payee existence: USDC balance, nonce or code on Base via Multicall3. Delivery: real payments by the scout wallet, coverage first: every seller whose cheapest endpoint is listed up to $0.25 in turn, at most once a week, and sellers up to $1.00 at most once every 60 days; each purchase is judged on a 2xx with non-empty, non-error content. x402 payments: USDC payments into indexed sellers' wallets on Base whose amount equals a price the seller quotes (payments at a price the seller does not quote are not counted; rows recorded before the 0.9.87 deploy on 2026-10-14 hold only daily totals, and for them a day's payments count when they average $1 or less), leaving out self-payments and wallets that paid more than 20 sellers in the window (crawlers and monitors); counted over whole UTC days, Oct 15–21. The sample CSV and this page are licensed CC BY 4.0; attribute "Settled (settled.tools)". Other measurers: publish your verdicts for the same sample and let's compare — reply on X or write in.
Data: Settled probes, sanctioned venue APIs and Base on-chain payout logs. Best-effort, not financial advice. Labels marked "suspected" can be disputed. Machine-readable: /v1/income/venues · llms.txt · openapi.json