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 earns 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.
• Service categories read from each service's own published description, with the quoted line kept as evidence.

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.
• Service categories cover cataloged providers only, and roughly a fifth of those publish no description to read. Expand a row and it says which of those applies to it rather than leaving a blank.