Market Outlook #9
Base has dominated x402 transactions for roughly three quarters straight, surpassing 140M transactions, but critics argue that a good number of them are gamed. So how much of it is real and how much is gamed?
TL;DR
x402 has in the last 30 days done:
โ 75.41M in transactions
โ $24.24M in volume
And Base makes up 70-72% of these transactions majorly via agents to agents payments. Other use cases have been for:
โ API calls
โ data access
โ content unlocks
โ pay-per-use services
โ machine-to-machine payments
Solana locks in around 48M to 50M transactions. Polygon is small, maybe 3M to 5M, while Sei, Arbitrum, Avalanche, BNB Chain, and Ripple are basically negligible, under 800k.
From the average transaction size chart, x402 average transaction size is down 98.2%. Earlier spikes were around $5 to $6, but most later periods sit below $1, and many are well below that.
โ Does this automatically mean the cost-per-services took a depreciating turn?
Not necessarily. Agents charge, on average, $0.02-$1 for their services like: API calls, data pulls, model access, compute, inference, routing, scraping, verification, automation, and content access. The payments for these are naturally small, frequent, and repetitive. So the low average transaction size is not a cost reduction report but probably a demand or type-of-service cost thing.
โ Then, are those transactions real or gamed?
From the chart, around late 2025 into early 2026, we noticed a major activity spike, and a meaningful part of that spike was gamed. The percent-gamed chart via @artemis shows periods where gamed transactions reached roughly 40% to 65%.
Agents gaming transactions?
Agents can indeed farm activities for incentive looping. In fact, @chainalysis named $PING as the main catalyst behind the Q4 2025 surge. @PingNetwork_io used a pay-to-mint model where users queried a URL, received a 402 payment response, paid 1 USDC, and minted tokens. This turned x402 into a speculative game, with transactions jumping over 10,000% in a week, and PING processing more than 150k transactions in its first month. Baseโs near-zero gas fees made it even cheaper for users to repeat the loop many times.
However, the real transactions chart shows a huge peak around the same late 2025 and early 2026, with weekly real transactions getting close to 10M to 12M at the highs before activity collapsed.
Recently, real transactions have recovered, with one bar around 4M+, then another around 2M to 3M.
โ So, what are agents paying for on Base and what apps are hosting these transactions?
They are mostly not paying inside normal Base DeFi or gaming apps. They are paying for off-chain services exposed through x402 endpoints, then settling the payment in USDC on Base.
The cleanest product is Agentic(.)market, which @coinbase describes as a marketplace for discovering, comparing, and integrating x402 services.
A few concrete examples:
โ .@browserbase lets agents pay with USDC on Base to launch hosted browser sessions.
โ .@CuseTheJuice is more niche but shows what agent-native services look like.
โ .@workagnt is basically AI employees with wallets.
In another dedicated post, weโll dive into the x402 app layer on Base.
Data: artemis, chainanalysis, x402(.)org, agentic(.)market.
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