Most x402 demos I have seen are testnet toys. I wanted to know what actually happens when an autonomous agent pays real USDC for real GPU capacity across more than one supplier, live, on Base mainnet.
So I ran it. Twelve agent initiated GPU jobs, across four independent providers (RunPod, Vast.ai, Lambda, and Hyperstack), settled on chain via x402, pulled straight from production execution logs afterward, not from a demo script.
Result: 12 of 12 jobs settled. Two of them needed an automatic failover mid request. One was Hyperstack refusing a job over an insufficient credit block. The other was RunPod returning a genuine HTTP 500, create pod, there are no instances currently available, when I asked for an RTX 4090. In both cases the router caught the failure and moved to the next provider without anyone touching a keyboard.
A separate diagnostic check outside the live job flow confirmed RunPod had no price at all for A4000, A5000, or A6000 across three repeated checks. That is a real, persistent inventory gap, not a fluke. One open question I have not closed yet: RunPod had a working price for RTX 3090 during that same check, but the live router never attempted it on that job. Flagging that as a real bug hunt, not a mystery I am hiding.
Numbers from the batch: $0.80 billed, $0.50 real provider cost, $0.30 margin captured automatically by the routing logic, zero manual quoting involved.
Happy to go deeper on the routing and failover logic, the x402 signing flow, or the schema behind execution_logs and job_attempts if anyone is building something similar. Ask away.
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