State of the agent economy

Early metrics show the agent economy is still nascent. Our probes found 2,607 AI agents indexed, but only 101 (~3.9%) were live (introspectable) and just 21 (0.8%) earned any on-chain revenue in 30 days. Total observed 30-day agent revenue was only $495.65, with a median of $6.31 per earning agent (95th percentile $98.75), and the top 10 agents capturing 95.4% of the volume (Gini ≈ 0.675). In short, the vast majority of agents do almost no business. Yet protocol governance is moving: Google has donated its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) to the FIDO Alliance and released AP2 v0.2 with new autonomous (“human-not-present”) payment features (blog.google). Likewise, the Linux Foundation has launched the x402 Foundation, taking over the open x402 rail originally built by Coinbase/Stripe/Cloudflare (www.linuxfoundation.org). Both moves were supported by industry leaders (e.g. AWS, Google, Visa, Mastercard) aiming to standardize agent commerce.

Where the money is flowing

New payment rails and partnerships are forming even as agent revenues stay tiny. Crypto-native x402 saw rapid use: reports claim ~3.3 million transactions in 30 days on x402 (averaging just $0.46 each) (www.kucoin.com). But big payments players are also entering. For example, Stripe partnered with the Tempo blockchain to introduce its Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) – an open, stablecoin/fiat payment standard – on Tempo’s mainnet (www.theblock.co) (www.kucoin.com). (Tempo’s March 2026 launch bundled MPP and a directory of merchants.) Visa and Mastercard are likewise building agent rails: they co-developed Stripe’s AP2 and donated its new “Verifiable Intent” log standard to FIDO (blog.google), and are active in emerging APIs. In parallel, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is gaining traction as the standard agent-to-API interface – major issuers (Stripe, Visa, Mastercard) have signaled MCP integration work (www.kucoin.com).

The chart below shows which discovery sources yielded the most live agents. Traditional registries and search crawls still dominate: our registry list found 64 live agents, while “recrawl_hot” (popular agent sites) found 50, and the new A2A-specific registry had 39 live entries. Many agents are being found via GitHub (32 live) and an MCP-centric registry (21 live). These panels illustrate the early ecosystem pipelines for agent discovery.

In terms of payment methods, the vast majority of indexed agents are not yet on any rail. Only 784 of 2,607 agents have an x402 setup (and only 2 have L402), leaving ~1,821 with no payment protocol. The donut chart below highlights the imbalance: roughly 30% of agents have x402 enabled; nearly all others remain unconnected to an on-chain payment scheme (and a negligible slice use L402). This underlines how early most agents are in adding commerce features.

Notably, although most agentatives make no revenue, crowds of conventionally real companies are investing in agentic commerce infrastructure. Startups like Skyfire and Halliday (per industry tracking) have raised on the order of $10–15 million to build x402-based payment and escrow services. On the consumer side, Amazon this week rolled out an AI shopping assistant (integrating the “Rufus” agent into Alexa) that can autonomously shop for users (www.axios.com) – showing that household-name platforms see value in letting agents transact. How and when such bots will plug into standards like AP2 or x402 remains to be seen.

Spec & protocol

Standards development accelerated this month. In payment protocols, Google’s gift of AP2 to the FIDO Alliance (announced April 29) has been followed by release of AP2 v0.2 (blog.google). This update adds support for “human-not-present” automated payments, letting pre-authorized agents execute purchases without interrupting users. Google also highlighted a new AP2-compatible “Verifiable Intent” log (co-built with Mastercard) to record user-approved actions (blog.google). The aim is to anchor agent transactions in cryptographically verifiable user consent; these specs now fall under FIDO’s open-standards process.

Meanwhile, x402 – the HTTP-402 agentic payments spec – has been submitted to the Linux Foundation. The new x402 Foundation (announced April 2) will steward the protocol originally developed by Coinbase, Stripe and Cloudflare (www.linuxfoundation.org). The press release lists dozens of member companies (Amazon, Adyen, AWS, Google, Mastercard, Microsoft, Solana, Visa, etc.) investing into x402 governance (www.linuxfoundation.org). In short, two main rails (AP2 and x402) are now in neutral, industry-led groups.

On the communication side, enterprise integrations are maturing. ServiceNow and Google Cloud announced a joint solution (Apr 22) that uses the A2A protocol and MCP to let agents across enterprise systems exchange tasks securely (www.streetinsider.com). This is one of the first public demonstrations of an A2A/A2UI/MCP “agent chain” at scale. The latest MCP roadmap (Mar 2026) likewise emphasizes transport scalability and enterprise readiness (blog.modelcontextprotocol.io). In practice, however, implementation is still sparse: for example, none of the agent cards we’ve seen are yet cryptographically signed (0% Signed in our data), meaning integrity checks remain a forthcoming feature.

Research & analysis

Academia and industry labs are analyzing the emerging agent economy. A major recent survey (Zhang et al., Apr 2026) systematized blockchain-based A2A payment designs like x402, identifying open challenges around intent binding and multi-party accountability (arxiv.org). Other new papers take constructive approaches: “ClawCoin” proposes a compute-indexed cryptocurrency as a shared unit for agent workflows (arxiv.org), addressing the gap between fiat rails and compute costs. Simulations by Liu et al. (“When Agent Markets Arrive”, Apr 2026) show that agent-to-agent marketplaces can triple wealth compared to standalone agents, but also that market design (e.g. visibility of identities, selection rules) crucially impacts outcomes (arxiv.org). And Uddin et al. (APEX, Apr 2026) show how HTTP-402-style micropayment gating can be adapted to fiat systems (like India’s UPI) with built-in spending policies and security (arxiv.org) – a blueprint for real-world agent payments without crypto. In short, research is actively exploring both theoretical and practical facets of agent commerce.

What to watch next week

The key question is who will be first to connect these pieces in practice. Keep an eye on any announcements around agent payment pilots or protocol testbeds. For example, Amazon’s new “Alexa for Shopping” rollout on May 13 (www.axios.com) signals that consumer-facing agents are arriving; it will be telling if Amazon or other big platforms soon adopt open rails (AP2, x402 or MCP) to handle backend transactions. In the open-source community, look for progress in agent card signing or AP2/FIDO working groups – these will be the milestones that turn today’s experimental agents into production commerce participants.