The real numbers

A skeptic under the video said the whole network does £20k a day and half of it is bots paying themselves. That deserves a straight answer with real data, so this lesson checks it, number by number.

The sharpest comment under the video came from a skeptic: “Right now the whole network does £20k a day and half of it is bots paying themselves.”

The real numbers

Let’s check it. Every figure below comes from x402scan, an open-source explorer that counts the USDC transfers made by known x402 facilitators, unless it says otherwise. Researchers pulled the data on 11 October 2026. Where a number can update, you’ll see the latest value with its date.

How much money moves on Base

$5.66M (11 Oct) source of USDC went through x402 on Base in the six months to 11 October 2026, across 41.5M (11 Oct) source payments. That works out at $30.8K (11 Oct) source a day.

The trend is down. Monthly dollars fell from $1.93M (30 Apr) source in April to $0.57M (30 Sep) source in September, which is about $19.0K (30 Sep) source a day. Over the latest 30 days the total was $0.70M (11 Oct) source.

How much money moves on Base

The all-time peak was November 2025, at $27.9M in one month. Most of that came from a craze for minting tokens: PING, the first, charged 1 USDC per mint, and Chainalysis says the quarter’s volume was “driven in large part by meme coin activity, particularly PING.” The share of payers who came back each week was 87% during the rush and 5% after it.

Why transaction counts mislead

While dollars fell, the number of payments rose, to between 9 and 13 million a month from June to August. Three things inflate counts.

Automation. 26.7M (11 Oct) source of Base’s payments in those six months came from a single BlockRun wallet. Five gateways together made 79% (11 Oct) source of the payments and only 9% of the dollars. At one of them, 25 to 40 wallets poll $0.002 endpoints all day. At another, a fixed fleet of about 300 wallets pays $0.001 at a time.

Why transaction counts mislead

Self-dealing. One facilitator, Meridian, carried 36% (11 Oct) source of all Base dollars on 0.2% of the payments. Over its lifetime, 41 wallets that sit on both sides of its payments, paying and being paid, account for 96% of its volume. In the latest 30 days, seven wallets each paid out almost exactly what they took in.

Why transaction counts mislead

Incentive contests. AX1 charges $0.02 to enter a weekly rewards contest, and its payments peak every Sunday before the Monday cutoff, as AX1 explained itself. Cluster Protocol counted x402 payers as eligible for a token airdrop. Payments like these are real transfers, but they buy a ticket, not a service.

Dollars can be lopsided too. In the 30 days to 11 October, one buyer paid 38.4% (11 Oct) source of all Base dollars in 18 payments.

How much looks like real purchases

The researchers sorted every large Base recipient from the six months into groups by how it was paid.

How much looks like real purchases

Only the second line looks like what x402 is for: many buyers paying a seller for a service. That’s 27% (11 Oct) source of the dollars. Counting the unsorted money, and the 9% of one-off transfers that could be sales, as real too gives an upper limit of 49% (11 Oct) source. In daily terms, that’s $8,400 to $15,000 of API-style spending on Base.

How much looks like real purchases

Other analysts see the same pattern. Visa, using Artemis data, put x402’s volume at about $15.0M across 109.6 million payments from launch to 21 April 2026, after removing identified wash trading and test activity. Reporting on the same Visa and Artemis work, The Defiant said roughly 4,000 wallets drove about 90% of the adjusted spending.

Base against Solana

On 25 August 2026, Solana passed Base on daily x402 payments. Artemis data put Solana at 76% (22 Sep) source of x402 payments in the four weeks to 22 September.

Base against Solana

x402scan shows the same swing and how short it was. Solana led on 19 of the 184 days, between 20 August and 8 September. Base’s weekly share of the two chains’ payments fell to 5.9% in the week of 24 August and was back to 76.8% by the week of 14 September. The researchers traced most of the swing to BlockRun’s traffic moving to Solana, which is their reading of the wallet data, not a published fact.

On dollars, Base leads. Over the 30 days to 11 October it had 66% (11 Oct) source of the two chains’ dollars and 81% (11 Oct) source of their payments.

So was the skeptic right?

“£20k a day.” About right. Base averaged roughly $19,000 a day in September and $23,000 a day over the 30 days to 11 October. Add Solana and the 30-day figure is about $35,000 a day. Those are dollars and the comment said pounds, but the size is right: tens of thousands a day, not millions.

So was the skeptic right?

“Half of it is bots paying themselves.” x402 is built for software to pay, so bots paying is expected. What matters is whether a buyer is paying someone else for something useful. On that test the comment was, if anything, generous. A third of the dollars went round in one closed loop, and only about a quarter, half at the very most, looks like real purchases.

So was the skeptic right?

What the comment didn’t cover is the one measure that is clearly rising. Daily downloads of @x402/core, the main x402 code library, grew from 11,586 in April to 41,913 in September, though those counts include automated installs. Developer interest is growing while spending isn’t.

Questions to ask any x402 number

• Payments or dollars? They tell different stories.
• Which chains, and which dates? A month in the minting craze isn’t a month today.
• Is wash trading or self-dealing filtered out? If not, assume a large share is.
• Is the page current? On 14 October 2026 the x402.org home page still showed 75.41M payments and $24.24M under “Last 30 Days”. Researchers found those figures stamped 25 August, and they are far above anything x402scan counts for a recent 30 days.