Report · edition 1 (baseline)

State of the Agent Economy, October 2026

How many paid x402 endpoints and MCP servers are publicly listed, what they charge, which networks they settle on, who lists them, and how much of the listing count reflects real use. Counted from five public registries on 7 October 2026.

Data as of 7 October 2026 · published 7 October 2026 · CC BY 4.0

Key findings

1. Listings are concentrated. One host accounts for 38.9% of the 35,169 resources in Coinbase's CDP x402 Bazaar (13,693 listings), and the ten largest hosts for 57.6%. In Circle's curated feed one provider accounts for 55.5%.
2. Most listed endpoints see almost no use. 57.0% of CDP Bazaar resources had exactly one unique payer in the trailing 30 days and the median resource had 2 calls. Only 395 resources (1.1%) had ten or more payers. A single resource accounted for 42.1% of all reported calls.
3. A cent is the default price. The median CDP Bazaar listing charges $0.01 per call; 54.7% charge exactly one cent and 82.5% charge one cent or less. Circle's curated feed is pricier, with a median of $0.10.
4. Base is near-universal. 99.2% of CDP Bazaar listings accept USDC on Base and 71.0% accept nothing else; 20.7% also accept Solana. In Circle's feed 90.4% of listings accept more than one mainnet.
5. Test listings are common outside Coinbase. 44.2% of PayAI's discovery listings (7,172) accept only testnet payment, mostly Base Sepolia.
6. The MCP Registry is moving fast. 48.2% of its 40,256 servers published their latest version on or after 1 September 2026. 62.9% are remote servers, and 97.1% of those offer streamable HTTP.
7. The registries barely overlap. Of 51,033 unique x402 URLs, 2,867 appear in more than one feed and 93 in all three. 1,381 MCP Registry servers mention x402 in their name or description.

This is the first edition and a baseline. Tanod's census has one daily snapshot so far, so this report describes the ecosystem's shape on 7 October 2026, not its growth rate. Later editions will report measured additions and removals between snapshots.

Registries and counts

x402 lets an HTTP server answer 402 Payment Required with a price, and lets a client (often an AI agent) pay in stablecoin and retry. Facilitators that settle those payments publish discovery feeds of the resources they have seen. The Model Context Protocol is how agents connect to tools; MCP servers are listed in the Official MCP Registry and in commercial directories such as Smithery.

We counted 35,169 resources in the Coinbase CDP x402 Bazaar, 16,220 in PayAI's facilitator discovery feed and 2,813 unique URLs in Circle's x402 discovery feed (2,853 entries; some URLs are listed once per HTTP method). The Official MCP Registry lists 40,256 servers (latest version of each; 487 marked deprecated). From Smithery we sampled 2,724 servers; its listing API does not allow a complete pull.

Who sells: hosts and concentration

We use the hostname of each resource URL as a proxy for the seller. The three x402 feeds together contain 2,909 distinct hosts. The CDP Bazaar has 2,133 hosts paying out to 1,535 distinct receiving addresses, and 972 hosts list a single resource. Listing counts, though, are dominated by a few hosts that publish one resource per dataset, region or parameter.

Largest CDP Bazaar hosts by listings, and their share of calls

The host with the most listings (market.datapackvibe.com, 13,693 resources) accounted for 2.1% of the 30-day calls the Bazaar reports. Listing count says little about traffic.

Prices

Prices are the USDC amount a resource quotes per call, taken from its payment requirements. Across the CDP Bazaar the quartiles are $0.006, $0.01 and $0.01; 27.9% of priced listings cost under one cent, and 302 cost a dollar or more. Taking each host's median price first, so that large hosts count once, the median host still charges $0.01.

Circle's feed is curated around named providers, and its prices sit an order of magnitude higher (median $0.10, host median $0.05). PayAI prices are computed over its 9,023 mainnet-priced listings; testnet listings are excluded from all price figures.

Networks

Base dominates settlement. 99.2% of CDP Bazaar listings accept USDC on Base, and 71.0% accept Base only. 22.1% accept more than one mainnet, most often Base plus Solana. Newer chains appear mainly through multi-network sellers: Arc, Monad and Robinhood Chain each show up in 2–4% of listings.

PayAI's feed looks different: 44.2% of its listings accept only testnet payment, 38.3% accept Base mainnet and 17.2% Solana. In Circle's feed 91.6% accept Base and 90.4% accept several mainnets, typically Base, Arc, Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Ethereum, OP Mainnet and Unichain together.

Listings versus usage

A listing is not a customer. The CDP Bazaar publishes, for every resource, the number of calls and unique payers it saw in the trailing 30 days, which makes it possible to check. All but 106 resources in the feed had at least one call in that window, and the oldest "last called" date we saw was 7 September, which suggests the Bazaar lists resources with a settlement in roughly the last 30 days.

57.0% of resources had a single payer, a pattern consistent with a seller paying its own endpoint once, for example to get it listed; 49.5% had at most one call. Reported calls total 868,198: the top ten resources account for 65.0% of them and the top 1% (352 resources) for 88.6%.

Largest CDP Bazaar hosts by 30-day calls

We have not verified how the Bazaar counts calls or payers; a "payer" is a paying address, and one operator can control many.

What is on offer

None of the open feeds carries a category field, so we grouped listings by keywords in their descriptions and paths. Counting distinct hosts rather than listings keeps a single bulk publisher from dominating a theme.

Circle's feed does carry provider categories, assigned by the provider:

MCP servers

The Official MCP Registry lists 40,256 servers from 23,993 publisher namespaces. 25,332 (62.9%) are remote servers with a URL, 14,924 (37.1%) are packages to run locally, and 1,994 offer both. Streamable HTTP is the dominant remote transport; 738 remote servers are SSE-only. npm is the main package source (10,586 servers), followed by PyPI (4,241).

Activity is recent. 19,397 servers (48.2%) published their latest version in September or early October 2026.

Concentration exists here too, but less. The ten largest namespaces hold 18.6% of entries. The largest single namespace has 2,365 entries, all pointing at one remote host. Remote servers point at 17,404 distinct hosts; the largest hosts are below.

In our Smithery sample, 94.9% of servers are remote (hosted) rather than local. Because the sample comes from keyword queries, we do not report other Smithery figures.

Overlap between registries

We matched x402 resources across feeds on a normalized URL (lowercased host without www., path without trailing slash, query dropped). 2,867 of 51,033 unique URLs appear in more than one feed, and 259 of 2,909 hosts. 91.1% of hosts appear in only one feed, so no single feed is a complete directory: the largest, the CDP Bazaar, contains 2,133 of the 2,909 hosts.

On the MCP side, 1,273 server names from our Smithery sample also appear in the Official MCP Registry (exact match on the name after removing punctuation, which is an imperfect test). 1,381 Official MCP Registry servers mention x402 in their name or description, a rough count of MCP servers that charge or help others charge per call.

Growth: what we can and cannot say

Tanod's census started its daily snapshots on 7 October 2026, so there is one day of history. We cannot yet measure how fast either ecosystem is growing, and we do not estimate it. Two in-data signals point to rapid recent activity, with caveats:

• MCP Registry: 48.2% of servers published their latest version since 1 September 2026 (figure 8). New servers and updated old ones both count, so this measures activity, not new entries.
• CDP Bazaar: the feed appears to be a rolling 30-day window of resources with settlements, so its size tracks recent activity rather than a cumulative total.

Later editions will compare daily snapshots directly: resources added and removed, price changes, and the share of new listings that ever attract a second payer.

Methodology and limitations

Sources and snapshot times (UTC)

• Collection. Tanod's census (agentindex) pages through each public, unauthenticated API at a polite rate and stores one snapshot per source per UTC day. CDP Bazaar, the MCP Registry and Smithery come from the 2026-10-07 daily snapshot. PayAI was collected the same day with the same collector code ahead of its addition to the daily run. Circle was fetched read-only from its public discovery API the same day.
• Deduplication. Within a feed, one row per resource URL (Circle lists some URLs once per HTTP method; we keep one). MCP Registry: one row per server name, latest version only. Smithery: one row per qualified name across 20 seed queries.
• Prices. The lowest USDC amount among a listing's payment options on mainnets (Base, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, OP Mainnet, Solana USDC contracts), converted at 6 decimals. Listings quoting only other assets or only testnets are unpriced. Networks are read from each payment option; testnets (Base Sepolia, Solana devnet and similar) are flagged.
• Sellers. Hostname of the resource URL (without www.). One operator can run many hosts and one host can serve many operators, so this is a proxy.
• Usage. The 30-day calls, unique payers and last-called fields are published by the CDP Bazaar. Other feeds do not publish usage.
• Themes. Case-insensitive keyword rules over each listing's description and URL path (below). They miss listings with terse descriptions and catch some false positives; treat them as rough.

Limitations

• Listings are not usage, revenue or quality. A listed endpoint may be a test, a duplicate or offline.
• Registries are not the ecosystem. Sellers that use other facilitators, or none, are missing. Glama, PulseMCP, x402scan and others were not included because their APIs need a key or payment.
• Smithery is a sample, biased toward servers that match our seed queries. The Docker MCP catalog was not reachable from our collector on the snapshot date and is excluded.
• One snapshot date. Counts move daily; the next daily snapshot will already differ.
• Names, URLs and descriptions are third-party text. Inclusion in this report is not an endorsement of any service.

Data downloads and citation

Aggregate tables only (no per-record data). JSON contains every figure on this page; the CSVs are the tables behind each chart.

• agent-economy-2026-10.json
• registries.csv
• x402-price-buckets.csv
• x402-price-summary.csv
• x402-networks.csv
• x402-top-hosts.csv
• x402-concentration.csv
• cdp-usage-payers.csv
• cdp-usage-calls.csv
• cdp-top-hosts-by-calls.csv
• x402-themes.csv
• circle-provider-categories.csv
• mcp-registry-transport.csv
• mcp-latest-version-by-month.csv
• mcp-top-remote-hosts.csv
• overlap.csv

Report text, figures and tables are licensed CC BY 4.0. Please cite as:

Tanod. "State of the Agent Economy, October 2026." 7 October 2026. https://tanod.dev/reports/agent-economy-2026-10.html

Credits

Underlying listings come from the Coinbase CDP x402 Bazaar, the PayAI facilitator discovery feed, Circle's x402 discovery API, the Official MCP Registry and Smithery. Chain names from chainid.network. Thanks to each for publishing open discovery data. Tanod is not affiliated with any of them.

More: the daily agent-economy index, x402 endpoints, MCP servers, all reports. Back to tanod.dev.