Before your agent pays another agent, run a check that costs cents

AI agents on Base already pay each other, pay APIs per call over x402, and pay addresses they were handed a minute ago. Most of them do it without looking at who is on the other side. A person would not wire money to a stranger's address without a glance at it; an agent should not either, and the glance can cost less than the gas.

This post is the routine we wrote for that glance: what to read before an agent pays, which signals mean "stop and ask a human", and how to run it on a schedule so the answer is never stale. It uses Agentic Finance Graph, an independent ledger of AI-agent money on Base. The free version is five read-only MCP calls; the one-call version is a 5-cent x402 request.

Why bother: what the ledger shows this week

Figures from the public API, measured 12 October 2026 between 09:48 and 10:54 UTC, each with the id of its frozen definition:

• 101,665 ERC-8004 agent registrations on Base (reg.minted.base.v1). Only 7,760 of them have ever been seen paying a different address after they were registered (rank.l7plus.v1). Most registrations are names, not active wallets.
• $84.5M of agent-wallet outflow was routing hops (money passing through a router or a bridge on its way somewhere else) and is excluded from spending; $28.4M is counted spending (pay.excluded.passthrough.v1, pay.usd.total.v1).
• 382 wallets that have made a counted agent payment were targeted by address-poisoning transfers in seven days (poison.targeted.7d.v1): someone planted a look-alike address in their history, hoping the next payment goes there by mistake.
• 115 detections in seven days (detection.week.v1): drain-shaped payments, retry storms that burn fees, mint bursts, owner changes under a binding.

None of these is a verdict on any one agent. Together they say that "it has a registration" tells you very little, and that the address you are about to pay deserves a look of its own.

The free routine: five calls

Connect the MCP server (stateless, read-only, no key):

{ "mcpServers": { "agentic-finance-graph": { "url": "https://agenticfinancegraph.com/mcp" } } }

Then, before paying agent X:

1. Find it. find_agent with a token id, slug, name or wallet address. If it is not ranked, say so: an agent never seen paying anyone has no record to check, and that is itself the finding.
2. Read the record. agent_record gives the liveness level (L7 paid someone, L8 paid and still funded, L9 three counterparties in 30 days), counted spending, counterparties, bindings and the 25 newest payments.
3. Read the statement. agent_statement returns the latest three-hour statement with a Merkle proof against an Ed25519-signed root. Refuse-to-pay signals: stale is true, chain_ok is false, or flags is not empty.
4. Read the detections. detections with the agent id. A detection is a shape with evidence, never a verdict.
5. Check the payee. counterparty_preview with the address you are about to pay: how many registered agents paid it and how many of them are ranked. An address no ranked agent has ever paid is "new to the ledger", which is worth saying before a large payment.

The same reads over plain HTTP, if your agent does not speak MCP:

curl -s https://agenticfinancegraph.com/api/agents?q=53008
curl -s https://agenticfinancegraph.com/api/statement/53008
curl -s "https://agenticfinancegraph.com/api/counterparty?address=0x0e84ddedaae6a779c462c22a59f301ec31b6b808"

A ready-made skill file with this workflow, for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and other assistants that read Agent Skills, is in the repository: skills/afg-check-agent.

The one-call version: precheck, 5 cents

Five calls are fine for an assistant. A paying agent in a loop wants one answer it can log. That is the precheck pack:

GET https://agenticfinancegraph.com/check/precheck?id=53008&payto=0x0e84…b808

It answers 402 Payment Required with the price (5 cents in USDC on Base) and the receiving address; an x402 client retries with a signed payment and gets back one dated JSON file with:

• the agent's level, last observed payment and payments in 30 days;
• live incidents, and how many were ever logged;
• how old its latest statement is, whether the chain is intact, and its flags;
• with payto: what that address is. Its label and the basis for it, contract or plain key, how many registered agents paid it, whether this agent paid it before, whether it sells over x402, and whether our poisoning watch saw it planted as a look-alike of an address the payer used.

It lists facts and, beside them, the published rules an operator may apply ("refuse if the statement is stale", "refuse a planted look-alike"). It never says "safe". The decision belongs to the paying agent's policy, not to us. An agent we have never seen paying is a 404 before any payment is asked for, so you are never charged for a pack about nothing.

Two smaller packs sit beside it: venue (3 cents) says what any address is and reads its last 48 hours of stablecoin flow live, and builders (1 cent) lists the ERC-8021 Builder Codes on one agent's payments, which tells you which apps build its transactions. Every pack and price: agenticfinancegraph.com/pricing.

Run it on a schedule, not once

A check from last Tuesday is not a check. Statements are written every three hours and the detectors run hourly, so a recurring payment relationship deserves a recurring look:

• Before every first payment to a new agent or a new address: the precheck, with payto.
• On a timer for agents you pay regularly: the free agent_statement every three hours. Pay for the precheck only when something changed.
• Alerts instead of polling: our Telegram bot (@AgenticGraphBot) watches up to three agents free and messages you when a detector logs something on one of them; a Desk plan raises that to 25 or 250.

At 5 cents, a precheck before each of 20 new counterparties a day is a dollar. One payment to a planted look-alike costs whatever was sent.

What this does not do

It does not know who operates an agent, whether a human approved a payment, or what the agent is for. It sees money on Base in stablecoins, not off-chain agreements. A clean precheck means "nothing in this ledger says stop"; it does not mean "safe". Every figure carries its measurement time and a definition id, so you can check what it counts before you quote it: agenticfinancegraph.com/def.

---

Agentic Finance Graph is an independent ledger of AI-agent money on Base: every ERC-8004 registration followed to the wallet bound to it, every payment's receipt read, routing hops excluded. Free API, MCP server and Telegram alerts; evidence packs from 1 to 25 cents over x402. Feedback and corrections are welcome in the comments.