x402 payments on Base — week 33, 2026

Published

Every week we publish the same numbers from our index of x402 / EIP-3009 USDC transfers on Base: no estimates, no third-party feeds, just what the chain shows. How we classify and score is described in the methodology.

This report covers 2026-08-10 to 2026-08-16 (UTC). The one number to take away: new addresses were up 75% on the week, and nearly half of them arrived in batches.

confirmed settled through a facilitator we track probable matches the x402 pattern, no facilitator seen excluded an EIP-3009 transfer that is not an x402 payment
Every number in this report is counted from the first two classes only. We keep the third visible rather than silently dropping it: what a series excludes is part of what it measures.

The index this week

Metric This week vs previous week
Addresses in the index, total 1,419,172
New addresses first seen 14,888 up 75.1%
Transfers observed 2,565,538 up 56.1%
Volume moved $7,204,944 down 9.6%
Median transfer $0.0060
Distinct payers active 17,573
Distinct recipients active 14,105

More transfers, less money: the count rose by half while volume fell, which is what a week of many very small payments looks like. Of the transfers we classified, 96.3% settled through a facilitator we track (confirmed); the rest match the x402 payment pattern without one (probable). 4,709 EIP-3009 transfers looked like something else entirely and are excluded from the x402 picture.

Payment behavior

Among recipients active this week with at least ten distinct payers in their history (629 addresses), the median share of one-off counterparties, payers who paid exactly once and never returned, was 45.2%. For 44 of them (7.0%), more than nine out of ten counterparties never came back. A high one-off share is not a verdict; it is one of the patterns we explain in every score, and on its own it is common among honest services with many one-time buyers.

Risk picture

This week 6,708 newly funded addresses arrived in 119 groups that share a single first funding source (counting only groups of ten or more). The largest such group holds 1,375 addresses. Shared funding is not proof of anything by itself, but it is exactly the pattern that batch-created address farms leave behind, and we watch it. Why it matters for anyone paying these addresses is in the x402 economy runs on disposable addresses.

Across the 187,567 addresses our nightly batch currently scores (the active set, not the whole index), the verdicts stand at:

Verdict Addresses
ok 6,034
caution 39,412
avoid 142,121

Want to check a specific address before paying it? The demo on the front page gives you free checks every day, and the API returns the same JSON for $0.01 per call.

Numbers in this report are computed from the WalletBureau index for the ISO week above; the queries were run on 2026-08-19. Classification rules are in the methodology.

Risk signals, not accusations. A low score means we saw patterns worth checking — not proof of fraud. We explain every flag, and we fix mistakes: if you think a flag is wrong, write to us and a human will review it.

Read the methodology →

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