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208,589 new AI agents on Base in one week: where the money went, and two things we were counting wrong

#ai #blockchain #web3 #agents

Measured on Base between 12:00 and 17:45 UTC on 20 October 2026. Every figure links to its public definition. "Counted payments" follows our netting rules, not raw transfers.

1. The registrations

Between 13 October 12:00 UTC and 20 October 12:00 UTC, 208,589 new ERC-8004 agent identities were registered on Base, taking the total from 111,902 to 320,491 (reg.minted.base.v1). Measured two ways: our registry table holds ids 0 to 320,490 with no gaps, and the highest agent id minted on chain before the cutoff is 320,489.

Almost all of them come from one platform. Of 300 ids sampled at random from the week, the 225 we could read all point their agent file to centralcity.ai, so at least 98.7% of the week is theirs (95% confidence). Central City gives each agent a "passport" on Base. On chain, each one is a separate smart account, registered through the ERC-4337 EntryPoint.

2. How many of them paid anyone

Our ladder ranks an agent L7 when it has paid money that left its own control (rank.l7plus.v2). On 20 October at 15:50 UTC: 9,593 agents. Five of them were registered this week.

Read that five with section 5 next to it. It is our count under our binding rule, and this week showed us one payment layout that rule does not see.

The L7 total also moved from 7,525 on 13 October, but almost none of that is new behaviour. It is our own correction (section 4).

3. Where the counted money went

Counted payments by registered agents on Base since each registration: $33.06M (pay.composition.v1), of which:

Destination Share
Lending or vault positions the agent still holds 49.1%
Bridges 18.0%
Work escrow (job marketplaces) 17.1%
Unnamed addresses 10.5%
Swaps 4.4%
Other registered agents 0.5%
x402 sellers 0.2%
Other lending and vaults 0.1%

x402:

  • Sellers listed in the Bazaar took $27.3K in 24 hours from 1,258 paying wallets (x402.seller.inflow.usd.24h.v1).
  • Only 3.9% of the wallets that paid x402 sellers on Base in the last 7 days are wallets bound to a registered agent (x402.bound.payers.v1). Most x402 money on Base is still not paid by an agent identity anyone can look up.

4. Two things we were counting wrong, fixed this week

Our payment reader starved part of its queue.

  • The bug: the query that picks which wallets to read next sorted by wallet address first. Wallets our sweep had flagged for moving stablecoins could wait up to three weeks: 4,447 on 18 October, the oldest flagged on 27 September.
  • The fix: since 18 October 09:42 UTC the queue is served by priority, oldest flag first.
  • The catch-up so far (20 October, 17:40 UTC): 87,328 payments worth $4.08M from about 3,000 agents. Almost all of them were made before 18 October.
  • What moved: L7+ 7,630 → 9,593, counted payments $29.26M → $33.34M, and the per-day series revised upward for the days those payments happened.
  • What it is not: new activity. It is payments read late. It is registered as a dated changepoint, cp-2026-10-18-payer-queue, in our changepoint register, and a closing entry will give the final size.

Batched x402 settlements were filed as "other".

  • The bug: a facilitator that lands EIP-3009 authorisations through Multicall3 aggregate3 was invisible to our submitter classifier, which read only the outer function.
  • The fix: the receipt's AuthorizationUsed now decides (x402.settle.submitter.v2; v1 stays published, marked superseded).
  • Measured over 20,000 settlements from 12 to 19 October: "other" 173 → 45, third-party submissions 61 → 125.
  • Found while checking a mainnet receipt for the ERC-8004 working group (erc-8004/erc-8004-contracts#99).

5. A payment layout we were not reading

Central City replied to our last weekly post. Its agents pay through its own fee routers on Base rather than a standard x402 facilitator, which is why trackers miss them. We checked from the chain.

What the chain shows:

  • Volume: since 14 October its three fee routers emitted 148,033 FeeCharged events, worth $77.8K in service payments.
  • Fee: exactly 10% of the price in every one, sent to the platform treasury.
  • Payers: every payer is the account an agent registration was minted to: 7,201 accounts, all registered since 11 October.
  • Payees: 147,993 of the payments go to the account that now holds another agent's registration. None goes to the payer's own agent.
  • Our blind spot: we bind an agent to the wallet that holds its registration, and ERC-8004 clears agentWallet when a registration moves. The paying side therefore never reached our count. Of 2,000 of these transactions sampled at random, 6 appear in our ledger.

What follows for us:

  • Central City's claim holds for us: this spending sits outside our count today.
  • Counting the minting account as an agent's wallet is a method change. We will measure it two ways and publish it as a new, dated definition version, not fold it in quietly.
  • Section 2's "five" should be read with this gap in mind.

6. Safety

  • Address poisoning: 456 agent wallets were targeted in the last 7 days (poison.targeted.7d.v2).
  • Losses: poisoned payments that actually landed stay at 2 in total, $60 (poison.losses.v2).
  • Reading: targeting is far more common than loss. The exposed moment is an agent's first payment to a new address.

Check it yourself

Figures are descriptions of on-chain activity, not judgments about any platform or agent.

AI-generated: drafted by an AI model from Agentic Finance Graph's measured data and checked against the chain and the ledger before publishing. Every figure carries its definition above; the measurement window is stated at the top.

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