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44,364 AI-agent ratings on Base, none after a payment from the rater: what real chain data adds to the review standards

#ai #blockchain #web3 #agents

Measured on Base mainnet with a cutoff of 20 October 2026, 21:00 UTC. The data set and its checker are public; links at the end.

The question the standards are trying to answer

AI agents now rate each other on chain. ERC-8004, the identity and reputation standard for agents, has a public registry where any address can leave feedback on any agent. On Base it holds 553,819 feedback entries.

A rating is cheap to write and cheap to fake. So the people working on the next version of the standard are asking a sharper question: does this rating follow a real payment? If the rater actually paid the agent, the rating rests on something that costs money. If not, it is an opinion from an address.

That discussion (erc-8004/erc-8004-contracts#99) has produced good work: receipt formats, test vectors, verifiers that check each other. Most of its examples are, by their authors' own description, test receipts or payments where buyer and seller are the same party. That is the right way to build a format. What it cannot show is what happens when the format meets millions of real addresses.

We publish a ledger of what AI agents on Base actually pay, read from the chain. So we ran the question on real data.

Finding 1: 0.147%

Of the 553,819 feedback entries on Base, 816 (0.147%) follow a stablecoin payment from the rater to the rated agent's wallet, made before the rating:

  • Who: 22 raters on 74 agents, backed by 165 payment transactions.
  • Rails: 813 were plain USDC transfers and 3 were x402 settlements.
  • Size: the median payment was $0.03.

On 14 October the same method gave 728 of 514,096. Both files are public, and the newer one does not replace the older.

Finding 2: one agent, two wallets

Since 11 October one platform, Central City, has registered most new agents on Base. Its agents are busy: through the platform's fee routers on Base they made 165,041 payments worth $113.0K by the cutoff, each with a 10% fee to the platform.

Each agent acts through two accounts:

  • Account A is the one the agent's registration was minted to. It pays.
  • Account B is the one the registration was then moved to. It receives payments and writes ratings.

ERC-8004 clears an agent's declared payment wallet when its registration moves. After the move, nothing on chain links account A to the agent.

What that does to a payment-backed rating rule:

  • Ratings: the same agents wrote 44,364 ratings, all tagged starred, each from a B account.
  • The test: for each rating (agent X rates agent Y), we asked whether X paid Y before rating. We tried both of X's accounts: its A account paying Y's B account through the routers.
  • The answer: 0 of the 44,364. 23 have a payment only after the rating, and 44,341 have none at all.

We checked that zero a second way, straight from the chain. For 60 random rating pairs we read the routers' event logs filtered by payer and payee over their whole life: 0 payments before the rating, 1 after. The same query found 3 of 3 pairs we knew had paid. A zero only means something if the same method can find a positive, and it did.

What this adds to the standard

  • Matching rater to payer misses this layout. On this platform the account that pays never rates, so even a fully paid relationship would not match. A rule must know every account that acts for an agent.
  • That link has to survive a transfer. Today the only on-chain link, the declared agent wallet, is cleared at exactly the moment this layout is created. One fix discussed in the thread: the agent's registration names each account that pays or rates for it, and each account signs back, so neither side is a bare claim.
  • Here the gap does not hide paid ratings. The rating wave and the payment wave on this platform do not meet, whichever account we try. This is a description of layout and timing, not a claim about anyone's intent.

Our own blind spot, found the same way

The same layout hid these agents' spending from our ledger. We tie an agent to the wallet that holds its registration, which here is B, while the spending comes from A.

  • How we found out: Central City told us publicly, and we checked from the chain. Of 2,000 of their payments sampled at random, 6 were in our ledger.
  • What we will do: count the minting account as the agent's spending wallet. That is a method change, so it will be measured two ways and published as a new, dated definition version, with the size of the change.

Check it yourself

Figures describe on-chain activity. They are not judgments about any platform, agent or rating.

AI-generated: drafted by an AI model from Agentic Finance Graph's measured data and checked against the chain and the ledger before publishing.

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