Notes, measurements, and analysis from the team measuring the agentic web.
Citable empirical writing grounded in our live index data. Each post carries inline sources + a BibTeX block.
x402 launched on Base in May 2025 and expanded to Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, Sei, and Ethereum mainnet by April 2026. After three months of running a chain-aware revenue scanner across the full asset list, the distribution is sharper than the announcement implied.
Read researchA2A v1.0 §8.4 standardizes JWS-signed Agent Cards. Of the 1,211 agents we currently observe responding to JSON-RPC, 97 publish a signature. Why the cryptographic-trust feature is shipped in spec but mostly absent in production, and which sources do and do not adopt it.
The EU Digital Identity Wallet ships a representation credential type — 'X is authorized to act on behalf of Y' — that is structurally identical to what an autonomous agent needs to prove. The credential pattern is already drafted in the EUDI Architecture and Reference Framework v2.8. Whether it lands as agent-readable infrastructure is now a presentation-protocol question, not an identity question.
Eight months of crawling every public agent / MCP registry produces an overlap matrix. The diagonal is mostly empty: registries advertise federation but few publish the same agent. The implications for trust, deduplication, and registry-of-registries are uncomfortable for all parties involved.
On April 23 Anthropic put filesystem-backed memory for Claude Managed Agents into public beta. OpenAI's Agents SDK update shipped vector-database memory with project, user, and policy tiers. Two frontier labs, one goal, opposite shapes — and the registry layer has no language yet for the trust properties that distinguish them.
Read postClaude Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 publish token rates. Production agent infrastructure analyses put those rates at roughly 38 percent of total spend — the other 62 percent is observability, orchestration, memory, and integration overhead that no public rate card describes. The largest variance in agent cost is architectural, not provider-driven.
PromptArmor's sub-one-percent false-positive and false-negative rates on AgentDojo got the conference headlines. A five-months-later paper, AgentDyn, finds that no defense attains acceptable real-world performance against longer, more dynamic agent workloads. The gap between the two results is the actual state of the field.
A2A 1.0 named cryptographic identity verification as a headline feature. The spec text standardizes the JWS signature format and leaves the trust decision about the signing key to the verifier. The two are not the same thing.
Anthropic shipped Agent Skills in October 2025. Seven months later, every major coding agent reads the SKILL.md format. The result is a third layer in the agent capability stack — separate from MCP, separate from tool calls — that almost no public registry indexes today.
The May 6 release of 10 prebuilt finance agents for banks and insurers is the first major productization of the three-layer agent stack. Each agent is described as a composition of Skills, MCP connectors, and delegated Claude subagents, with the data integration layer pre-wired by Anthropic. Early adopters include BNY, Citadel, FIS, Carlyle, Mizuho, and Travelers.
ERC-8004's most architecturally honest sentence is in the EIP itself: identity registration does not prove capability. The standard then designs around that admission with three separate registries. Most agent registries hold the same property without naming it.
Regulation (EU) 2024/1183 puts at least one government-issued EU Digital Identity Wallet in every Member State by 6 December 2026. The current Architecture and Reference Framework — v2.8.0 — explicitly removes the legal-person credential from scope and defers it to a separate 'European Business Wallet'. The credential pattern an agent acting on behalf of a company actually needs sits between the two.
The first post on the Agenstry blog — why a registry that hides its discovery funnel can't be trusted, and what we publish instead.
Glama lists 21,000+ MCP servers, PulseMCP 11,840+, Smithery 7,000+, and the official AAIF registry a smaller curated subset. The numbers don't agree, the curation policies don't agree, and the discovery decision is now upstream of every consumer in the stack.