Economy methodology

What “settled” means

• A payment is settled when its on-chain sender is a known payment facilitator (canonical USDC), or it carries an MPP payment receipt (the settlement memo binding it to the service it paid).
• Everything else is a candidate and never enters a headline number.
• Counting starts May 1, 2025 (the x402 launch); each payment counts once, in a single direction.

Identity resolution

Identity resolves via two paths: a wallet (signed on-chain) or an operator credential. Stronger proof unlocks entity-level classification.

Enrichment

• Registered endpoints probed for health.
• Published SOC 2 / ISO 27001 pages extracted.
• ERC-8004 reputation feedback aggregated.
• Domains checked for age, popularity, and security posture.

The agent directory shows the values we found and when we last checked, never bare checkmarks.

Caveats

• Agent counts are registrations per registry, not de-duplicated unique agents.
• Domain trust signals exist only for wallets bridged to an apex domain.
• Settled totals count facilitator-settled payments and MPP receipts only.
• The facilitator registry is hand-curated; payments settled by unknown facilitators are not counted until the registry learns them.
• Sub-$0.001 dust and self-transfers are dropped before counting.
• Only the memo'd leg of an MPP payment is counted, so nothing is double-counted.
• On Tempo, settled volume includes memo'd payments with no resolvable service reference.