How Paddock measures agent commerce.
Every figure Paddock publishes is traceable to a documented source and scoped to a stated coverage tier. This page is the reference for citing Paddock data in research, diligence, and analysis.
Data sources
Paddock merges independent public sources into a single, cleaned view, and traces every figure to the source that underpins it.
x402scan all-facilitator aggregate
The stats.overall settlement aggregate across all x402 facilitators. Basis for Agent Settlement Volume and all transaction counts.
CDP Bazaar catalog
Per-origin service listings from the Coinbase x402 Bazaar, refreshed across all pages and chains. Basis for origin-level attribution.
Registry harvest
A crawl of public agent-service listings, capturing each project's self-declared payTo address and category from its live 402 response or .well-known/x402.json.
Liveness probes
Probes of whether listed services actually respond, so attribution and Spend Share reflect live services rather than dead listings.
Coverage tiers
Agent-commerce data exists at three levels of resolution. Each figure Paddock publishes is drawn from one of them.
Agent Settlement Volume
Paddock's flagship metric — the headline measure of how much AI agents settle on-chain.
The total USDC settled through x402 agent payments that Paddock observes via x402scan's all-facilitator aggregate, reported as a 7-day rolling average.
The 7-day rolling average is the headline figure; the raw daily value is reported alongside it as context, because daily settlement is volatile and a single day is not representative of the trend.
Attribution
Attribution maps a settlement wallet to the named service behind it — turning anonymous on-chain payments into category and provider intelligence.
How the map is built
The wallet-to-service map is built from the full Bazaar catalog — all pages, all chains, every payTo — and extended through verified manual mapping. Resolution works forward: it begins from a project's own live payment configuration, not inferred from wallet behavior. Each mapping is checked against the seller's self-declared config before it enters the map.
Excluded wallets
- Facilitator and pooled wallets are classified and excluded — they carry pass-through volume, not the demand of a single service.
- Identified circular clusters are excluded from attribution (see §05).
Circular detection
Not all settlement is demand. Paddock detects circular (self-funded) settlement and reports it as a scoped finding.
Criteria
A cluster is flagged as circular on the basis of self-funding analysis — the share of a cluster's inflow originating from within the cluster itself — corroborated by on-chain reconstruction of the payer side of each settlement.
Scope and scale
The largest identified circular cluster represents a large majority of a single facilitator's volume but only a fraction of a percent of total settled transactions ecosystem-wide. Both are true; they differ only in denominator — which is exactly why the two are never conflated.
Scope limitation
Circular detection currently covers facilitators with on-chain-readable settlement. Clusters on facilitators without a readable settlement path are not yet detectable, and Paddock states this limit rather than implying market-wide coverage.
Beyond x402
Agent commerce settles across many rails, and they are not equally observable. Paddock measures each to the depth its data allows — and labels which is which.