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State of the agent economy

Live measurement of the agent web: supply funnel, live-rate by ecosystem, protocol adoption, inflow concentration, and 30-day growth. Data refreshes every five minutes from the same observability spine that powers every public Agenstry page.

    As of 2026-10-12 15:24:23 UTC
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Weekly briefing · 2026-W42 archived view

        Oct 12, 2026
      

The week’s clearest signal is a widening gap between technical reachability and observed payment activity: Agenstry’s live listings edged down week over week, while listings linked to inbound USDC rose sharply. That does not mean the market suddenly became more active: the earning measure covers scanned wallets, and many paid APIs answer with a payment challenge rather than a free live probe. Meanwhile, this week’s UK announcement put the security of autonomous systems more squarely on the policy agenda.

Activity and measurement

As of October 12, Agenstry indexed 8,921 listings, down 2,191 (19.7%) from 2026-W41. Live listings numbered 1,099, down 60 (5.2%); 146 listings had a JWS-signed card. These measures capture different properties: a parseable card is not necessarily a working endpoint, and a working endpoint is not necessarily authenticated.

The earning measure moved in the opposite direction. Agenstry recorded 3,209 listings whose declared payTo wallets received inbound USDC in the last 30 days, up 1,462 (83.7%) week over week. That is not a count of distinct sellers or an ecosystem-wide revenue total: 3,209 listings map to 1,695 earning wallets, and the scan covered 2,288 of 2,548 listings with a wallet. The distinction matters because paid APIs may return HTTP 402 rather than respond to an unpaid JSON-RPC probe.

The measured 30-day gross was $960,169.61, but activity remains highly concentrated: the top listing accounted for 69.8% of gross, the top 10 for 91.3%, and the Gini coefficient was 0.994. Those figures suggest that rising counts alone are a poor proxy for a broadening market. New-agent additions over 30 days were 2,563, down 570 (18.2%) from the prior week’s comparison.

Protocols and standards

The latest weekly protocol cohort needs cautious reading. The supplied 2026-W42 cohort contains 22 listings, compared with 429 in W41, but W42 began on October 12 and the snapshot was taken that same day. It is therefore an incomplete week, not evidence of a sudden collapse. Of the cohort’s 22, 20 were tagged x402, one AP2, and one MPP.

Across the current corpus, x402 remains the dominant payment-protocol label, with 4,994 listings; MPP had 123, A2A-x402 64, and AP2 38. Labels are not equivalent to verified runtime behavior: among 5,224 protocol-labelled listings, 2,163 had self-declared-live evidence, such as an endpoint returning an unpaid payment challenge or serving an x402 manifest. Runtime challenges remain the stronger evidence.

The x402 repository’s October activity points to practical integration issues rather than a settled new standard. Open issues dated October 5–7 include reports involving browser access to payment headers, settlement receipts, and payment-response handling. These are reports and proposals, not confirmed defects or adopted specification changes; they are useful signals of where implementers are still testing interoperability. x402 repository issues

Regulation and security

On October 12, the UK government announced a package of measures addressing AI risks, including using frontier AI for cyber defence, examining stronger legal protections, and preparing for serious incidents involving autonomous AI systems. The announcement does not itself establish a new agent-specific compliance regime, but it raises the salience of incident readiness as deployments become more autonomous. UK government announcement

For infrastructure providers, the operational question is increasingly concrete: can a system’s actions, external connections, and payment flows be observed and reconstructed when something goes wrong? Agenstry’s current measurements show why no single signal answers that question. Cards, live probes, signatures, payment challenges, and observed wallet receipts each describe a different slice of trust and activity.

What to watch next week

Track whether the October 12 UK announcement is followed by concrete proposals or incident-reporting requirements, and whether x402 maintainers resolve the newly reported header and settlement issues. On the Agenstry side, the next full-week protocol cohort will be more informative than W42’s partial count.

Sources

1 · Supply funnel

Most of the agent economy is indexed, not yet operational.

Counting agents conflates supply with operation. Below is the corpus broken into five stages: what fraction of indexed agents pass each gate. The decay curve is the honest read on how mature the agent web is at any given moment.

Stage	Count	% of indexed	Definition
Indexed	8,937	100.0%	Every listing we hold across every source; 2,870 archived listings are not counted here or in any step below.
Valid card	7,711	86.3%	Returned a parseable A2A/MCP card on probe.
Live	1,100	12.3%	Live JSON-RPC / introspectable MCP.
Signed	146	1.6%	Card published with a JWS signature.
Earning (30d)	3,209	35.9%	Listings whose declared payTo wallet received inbound USDC in the last 30 days (1,694 distinct wallets; several listings can share one). Measured over the wallets scanned so far (2,287 of 2,556 with a wallet) — not an ecosystem-wide total. Not a subset of Live: most are paid APIs, which answer 402 rather than a free JSON-RPC probe.

2 · Live-rate by ecosystem

Which source registries actually ship live agents.

Each row shows one source registry (Anthropic's MCP directory, Smithery, Glama, Postman, GitHub well-knowns, Wayback CDX scans) alongside how many of the agents it lists actually respond live on probe. The gap between seen-count and live-count is the source's effective freshness.

Source	Seen	Live	Live rate
agentic_market	4,349	185	4.3%
cdp_discovery	3,672	162	4.4%
manifests	2,068	468	22.6%
mcp_registry	1,747	270	15.5%
n8n_workflows	1,226	0	0.0%
x402_list	1,089	80	7.3%
github_code	894	78	8.7%
smithery	871	179	20.6%
registry	791	374	47.3%
a2aregistry	643	341	53.0%
lists	547	52	9.5%
a2a_registry_org	325	141	43.4%
dexter_discovery	184	1	0.5%
github_topics	163	8	4.9%
mpp	93	1	1.1%

3a · By protocol kind

A2A vs MCP vs paid_api

paid_api

4,782

a2a_agent

2,929

workflow

1,226

3b · By observed payment-protocol label

Index composition, not global market share. x402 has multiple dedicated catalogs and a live HTTP probe; AP2, L402 and Stripe ACP are predominantly visible only when cards declare them.

x402 / AP2 / Stripe MPP / L402

x402

5,010

mpp

123

a2a_x402

ap2

l402

stripe_acp

3b · Evidence grade

How we know they take payment

2,182 of 5,240 payment-labelled agents (41.6%) proved it themselves — their own endpoint answered an unpaid request with an HTTP 402 challenge, or the host serves a /.well-known/x402 manifest. The rest is declared in a static agent card or described by a third-party catalog.

Facilitator feed

1,968

Live 402 challenge

1,659

Agent card

581

Catalog listing

481

/.well-known/x402

412

mpp_manifest

mpp_challenge

Official protocol directory

3c · Indexed protocol labels over time · last 12 weeks

Newly indexed agents per week, by payment label

Changes reflect both ecosystem activity and changes in crawler source coverage.

a2a_x402 ap2 mpp stripe_acp x402

4 · Inflow concentration · 30d

A few settlement wallets receive most of the money.

Across 1,694 earning wallets backing 3,209 linked services, the distribution is heavily power-law. Wallet-level Gini and HHI avoid multiplying transfers when several catalog entries share one recipient.

Observed inflow · 30d

$960,159.59

Recipient wallets

1,694

Active sellers · 30d

1,439

Median · wallet

$0.383

p95 · wallet

$109.19

Top 1 share

69.8%

Top 5 share

83.2%

Gini

0.994

extreme inequality

HHI

4932

highly concentrated

5 · 30-day growth

New agents arriving daily, by first-seen.

Daily count of agents we discovered for the first time. Sourced from every registry + open-web crawl we run.

      2026-09-13
      peak 251/day
      2026-10-12
    

New agents · 30d

+2,579

New earning wallets · 30d

798

first observed earning in the last 30 days

Cite this report

Public domain numbers (CC BY 4.0). Pick the format that fits. The page auto-updates so the URL is the canonical pointer; the date stamps the snapshot you cited.

Plain text

Agenstry Research. "State of the Agent Economy." Accessed 2026-10-12. https://agenstry.com/reports/state-of-agent-economy

BibTeX

@misc{agenstry_state_of_agent_economy,
  title  = {State of the Agent Economy},
  author = {Agenstry Research},
  url    = {https://agenstry.com/reports/state-of-agent-economy},
  note   = {Accessed 2026-10-12},
  year   = {2026}
}

Embed (iframe)

<iframe src="https://agenstry.com/reports/state-of-agent-economy" width="100%" height="900" frameborder="0"></iframe>

Scope What this report measures, and what it doesn't

Inflow figures count public stablecoin transfers into wallets declared by indexed agents. They are reproducible from public chains, but a transfer may be self-funded and is not proof of a sale. See the measurement method.

Private and off-chain payments, and Agenstry's own paid-skill receipts, are excluded. Coverage varies by chain, asset and date.

Methodology

This report uses dated observations from the public index. Check source coverage, scoring rules and the public feed before comparing it with another dataset.