Original data · 2026-07-18

The x402 economy, measured: one seller is 40% of the catalog

Our crawler indexes the x402 Bazaar discovery catalog three times a day. Most writing about the x402 protocol quotes the same press releases; almost nobody publishes measurements. Here is what the catalog actually looked like on July 18, 2026 — including the numbers that flatter nobody, ours included.

The headline numbers

What does an x402 call cost? Mostly a few cents

Price distribution across live listings with a parseable price (24,816 resources):

Two-thirds of the market prices between one and ten cents. This is the range card networks structurally cannot serve — the entire reason HTTP 402 sat unused for 30 years — and it is exactly where the agent economy is forming.

The uncomfortable number: 40% of listings are one wallet

A single seller wallet accounts for 10,028 of the 24,816 live listings — 40% of the entire catalog. The next-largest seller has 1,646. Strip the whale out and the "real" distributed catalog is closer to 15,000 resources across 1,135 sellers — a median seller with a handful of endpoints.

We publish this because honest measurement beats hype: raw listing counts overstate the ecosystem’s diversity, and any agent (or investor) evaluating x402 should filter by seller concentration. It is also a very young-market signature — low listing costs invite bulk publishing, and discovery layers haven’t yet learned to rank by reputation. The seller-count trend is the better health metric: 1,100 → 1,136 in three days, all independents.

Smaller signals worth knowing

• Network labeling is still wild-west. Base mainnet appears under two different identifiers — the CAIP-2 form ("eip155:8453", 11,892 listings) and the bare label ("base", 12,428). Agents doing catalog work need to normalize both.
• Testnet listings pollute the live catalog. ~335 listings settle on Base Sepolia or other testnets — fine for demos, but a paid agent that doesn’t check the network field will waste calls on them.
• Solana is present but small — about 150 listings on mainnet. The x402 Foundation’s membership (Solana Foundation is a premier member) suggests that share grows.

Methodology

ForgeMesh crawls the public x402 Bazaar discovery catalog three times daily and stores per-resource records (price, network, seller wallet, description) plus per-snapshot totals. Numbers above are from the July 18, 2026 12:15 UTC snapshot; cumulative counts span July 15–18. We operate 11 x402 services and counting ourselves, so our own listings appear in these counts — they are a rounding error against the totals. Want the data updated or sliced differently? Ask.

Related reading: our follow-up health census of every Bazaar seller and the overnight purge that erased 43% of the catalog.