State of the agent economy

The agent web is broadening faster than it is becoming dependable. As of 2026-09-21T13:05:54.820552+00:00, Agenstry indexed 9,653 candidates, up 382 (+4.1%) week on week, while live endpoints rose by 70 (+9.0%) to 846; yet only 118 cards were signed and only 358 payment-labelled services had authoritative runtime payment evidence. The commercial layer is real but highly concentrated: 1,305 observed earning wallets connected to 2,544 services generated $216,986.77 over 30 days, with the top seller accounting for 82.3% of gross volume.

Reach is expanding; operational conformance remains scarce

The principal operating fact remains the gap between declaration and execution. Of 9,653 indexed candidates, 7,337 returned a parseable A2A or MCP card, but 846 were live JSON-RPC or introspectable MCP endpoints. That represents 8.8% of the indexed universe, compared with 76.0% returning a valid card. Only 1.2% were signed. The implication for buyers, registries and enterprise procurers is that discovery metadata should be treated as a lead, not a service-level guarantee.

Source quality differs sharply. The a2aregistry cohort had an 83.3% live rate, registry 63.0%, and a2a_registry_org 40.7%; by contrast, n8n_workflows yielded no live endpoints, while recrawl_cold produced 0.7%. That dispersion supports an operating model in which high-yield registries receive priority refresh and assurance checks, while broad code and workflow discovery remains a prospecting channel. The week’s rise in live endpoints outpaced indexed growth, but the 30-day new-agent count slipped to 2,660 from 2,787, down 127 (-4.6%) week on week.

Payments: x402 dominates listings, while revenue remains concentrated

x402 accounts for 4,862 of the declared payment-protocol records, versus 90 for MPP, 44 for A2A x402 and 23 for AP2. But the evidence base is thin: of 5,024 labelled services, 358—or 7.1%—were self-declared live through an unpaid HTTP 402 response or a served /.well-known/x402 manifest. Agenstry’s runtime challenge remains the meaningful test, rather than a directory listing, static card, or catalogue entry.

The revenue picture reinforces the distinction between listings and functioning markets. There were 214 active sellers and 476 payer-ledger wallets over the measurement window. Median revenue was $0.255 and p95 revenue $44.6397, while the top five sellers captured 93.4% and the top ten 94.9%; the Gini coefficient was 0.993 and HHI 6819.0. The HHI eased from 6,840.90 to 6,819.00, a decline of 21.90 (-0.3%), but not enough to change the structural conclusion: agent-to-agent commerce is presently a narrow set of high-volume settlement relationships, not a distributed long-tail market.

The week-on-week “earning” count fell from 2,502 to 1,305, down 1,197 (-47.8%). Readers should interpret that measure precisely: it is observed inbound USDC at declared x402 payTo addresses, counted one time per wallet; 1,827 of 2,104 scannable wallets were scanned, and the 1,305 wallets link to 2,544 services. It is explicitly not an ecosystem-wide revenue total.

Protocol work is shifting toward validation, statefulness and delegated authority

A2A’s roadmap, updated September 15, prioritises v1.1 robustness, bidirectional streaming, a CLI for coding harnesses, elicitation and multi-turn workflows. It also identifies the A2A Inspector and Technology Compatibility Kit as validation efforts—an important acknowledgement that interoperability depends on testable behavior, not merely compatible cards. A2A’s roadmap (github.com)

MCP is moving from specification release into implementation and professionalisation. The July 28 specification introduced a stateless core, multi-round-trip requests, header-based routing, cacheable list results, authorization hardening and a formal extensions framework; official SDK repositories continued updating through September 21. MCP’s specification announcement and official repositories (github.com) The Agentic AI Foundation’s September 14 MCP Associate certification is a further institutional signal that implementation security and governance are becoming distinct labour-market skills. AAIF announcement (linuxfoundation.org)

Delegated payments are becoming a governance problem, not only a checkout problem

AP2 v0.2 frames autonomous payments around signed Checkout and Payment Mandates, with a trusted surface required to obtain the authorisations and deterministic code required for validation. Its documentation explicitly includes both autonomous and human-present flows, and the specification is now being standardised through FIDO working groups. AP2 documentation and v0.2 specification (github.com)

Research is converging on the residual risk: signatures can preserve transaction integrity after authorisation without proving that the agent’s pre-authorisation context accurately represented the user’s intent. A recent AP2 security analysis identifies threats across transaction phases and deployment architectures; a separate formal study of x402, MPP, ACP and AP2 reaches the related conclusion that delegated authority must remain bound to economic and service outcomes across the lifecycle. AP2 security analysis and formal analysis of agent payment protocols (arxiv.org)

Regulators and payment networks are following the same path. EMVCo has opened feedback on a framework for card-based agentic payments focused on intent, delegation, agent identity and transaction signalling, while the UK government has pointed to ongoing payments-regulation modernisation and FCA sandbox work on agent-led payments and commerce. EMVCo framework consultation and UK parliamentary response (emvco.com)

What to watch next week

The specific item to track is whether A2A’s validation tooling moves from roadmap language into broadly usable compatibility tests and published results. That would address the most consequential gap in this week’s data: the distance between an agent that can be found, an endpoint that answers, and a service that can safely transact.