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.
Week 43 is opening with a wider live surface, but not yet with evidence of a more mature or evenly distributed agent economy. Agenstry’s indexed corpus rose to 9,531 listings and live endpoints to 1,329; meanwhile, recent revenue remains highly concentrated, and the current week’s protocol cohort is only a partial-week snapshot as of Monday, October 19.
Reach is growing faster than verified operation
Indexed listings increased by 610 week over week (+6.8%), while live endpoints rose by 230 (+20.9%). That is a stronger gain in operationally probeable services than in listings overall. Yet the funnel remains steep: 8,233 listings returned a parseable A2A/MCP card, but only 1,329 were live on JSON-RPC or introspectable MCP, and 171 published a JWS signature. The distinction matters for buyers and integrators: a discoverable card is not the same as a working endpoint, and neither establishes signed identity.
The source mix reinforces that point. The registry and A2A Registry listings have live rates of 57.4% and 65.7%, respectively, while agentic_market is at 5.1% and cdp_discovery at 5.6%. These are source-level rates, not directly comparable quality rankings: source populations may differ in how they select and describe listings. Still, the gap suggests that discovery coverage is broader than reliable runtime availability.
Payments: x402 dominates the measured surface
Among listings with payment-protocol evidence, x402 is the clear center of gravity: the corpus records 5,442 x402 listings, against 129 for MPP, 73 for A2A x402, and 38 for AP2. The W43 cohort shows 35 x402 entries and no entries for the other listed payment protocols—but the cohort begins October 19, so it is a partial week and should not be read as a weekly adoption comparison with W42’s 592.
Evidence quality remains an important qualification. Agenstry labels 5,687 payment-protocol records; 2,623 are self-declared live, meaning the endpoint itself answered an unpaid request with a 402 challenge or served an x402 manifest. The dataset notes that runtime challenges are authoritative; static cards, directories, and catalog entries are weaker evidence. This distinction is relevant as implementation work continues: the x402 Foundation repository’s current issue tracker shows active discussions and reported bugs involving payment-header compatibility, settlement retries, response sizes, and browser access. Those entries are issue reports and proposals, not proof that the underlying problems are widespread or unresolved.
Revenue remains concentrated
Over the measured 30-day window, gross receipts were $912,688.77 across 3,345 earning listings, with a median of $0.32. The top seller accounts for 73.4% of receipts, the top 10 account for 93.6%, and the Gini coefficient is 0.995. Week over week, the earning-listing count rose by 136 (+4.2%), while the supplied Gini delta moved from 0.994 to 0.995.
These figures describe Agenstry’s scanned wallet-linked sample, not the whole ecosystem. The measurement covers wallets scanned so far—2,629 of 2,714 listings with a wallet—and multiple listings can share one wallet. Nor is “earning” a subset of “live”: many paid APIs return a 402 challenge instead of answering a free JSON-RPC probe. The concentration signal is therefore useful as a view of observed settlement, but should not be mistaken for a complete market-share estimate.
Protocol governance and implementation
There was no confirmed major specification release in the sources reviewed for this week. The latest notable A2A project announcements found were earlier: the project’s October 1 post introduced its CLI, while its August announcement described joining the Agentic AI Foundation. For MCP, the most relevant official update located was the August roadmap, rather than a release published during W43. The distinction is worth keeping: protocol roadmaps and governance changes set direction, but do not on their own establish that deployed agents interoperate reliably.
What to watch next week
The immediate question is whether W43’s x402-heavy intake persists once the week is complete, and whether new listings convert into live, independently probeable services. The next full-week comparison should separate genuine adoption from Monday’s partial cohort effect and track runtime evidence alongside registry growth.
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.
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.
A2A vs MCP vs paid_api
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
How we know they take payment
2,624 of 5,688
payment-labelled agents (46.1%) 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.
Newly indexed agents per week, by payment label
Changes reflect both ecosystem activity and changes in crawler source coverage.
A few settlement wallets receive most of the money.
Across 1,928 earning wallets backing 3,345 linked services, the distribution is heavily power-law. Wallet-level Gini and HHI avoid multiplying transfers when several catalog entries share one recipient.
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.
What the market asked for and didn't get.
Every section above measures the supply we indexed. This one measures demand we couldn't serve: clustered search intents — from browsers, AI assistants and agents calling our A2A and MCP endpoints — where the index returned nothing or almost nothing. Aggregate only, and shown only for intents searched by enough distinct sources to be a market signal rather than one person's session.
| Intent | Demand | Unmet | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|
| weather+forecast | active | 47% | steady |
| aidata | active | 45% | new |
Full list + method: what the agent economy is missing. Building one of these? Add pay-per-call payments to your API →
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.
Agenstry Research. "State of the Agent Economy." Accessed 2026-10-19. https://agenstry.com/reports/state-of-agent-economy
@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 2026-10-19},
year = {2026}
}
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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.
Weekly State of the Agent Economy
One analyst briefing a week: what changed in earning wallets, observed revenue, concentration and new agents, the spec, launch and research news behind it (with sources), plus supply-funnel, protocol-mix and growth charts. Free, Mondays.
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