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.
Agenstry’s 2026-W46 snapshot shows the live layer gaining faster than the indexed corpus: live listings rose by 230 (+15.3%), against indexed growth of 409 (+3.7%). But the new week’s payment cohort is only a Monday snapshot, while recent USDC receipts remain concentrated among a limited set of sellers; neither listing counts nor protocol declarations alone establish broad, durable demand.
Live coverage improves faster than discovery
The indexed corpus reached 11,443, up 409 (+3.7%) from W45. Listings passing Agenstry’s live probe rose to 1,737, up 230 (+15.3%). The gap between discovery and operation remains substantial: 9,963 listings returned a parseable card, but only 1,737 were classified as live. A valid card is evidence of structured metadata, not proof that an endpoint answers the live probe.
Source-level live rates vary sharply. The registry recorded 588 live listings from 1,001 seen, while agentic_market recorded 304 from 5,947; n8n_workflows recorded no live listings under this probe. These rates are not direct quality rankings because the sources contain different kinds of listings and may expose different interfaces. They do, however, underline that inclusion in a directory and successful runtime interaction are distinct measures.
x402 leads the payment records; the new cohort is incomplete
Agenstry’s payment-protocol inventory lists 6,766 x402 records, versus 135 for MPP, 98 for A2A x402 and 45 for AP2. Its W46 cohort contains 24 entries, all x402. That is an intake snapshot dated November 9, not a full-week comparison with W45’s 427 entries, so it cannot yet establish a change in adoption pace.
Evidence strength also varies. Among 7,051 labelled records, 3,573 are classified as self-declared live: an endpoint answered an unpaid request with an HTTP 402 challenge, or the host served an x402 manifest. The rest rely on a card, directory or catalog listing. Agenstry’s methodology treats runtime challenges as authoritative; the distinction matters when assessing whether payment support is implemented rather than merely advertised.
No new A2A, MCP, AP2 or x402 specification release was verified in this week’s search. The latest stable MCP release remains the July 28 specification, which introduced a stateless protocol core and other changes; it is background, not a W46 update. MCP specification announcement
Receipt-linked listings rise, but revenue remains concentrated
Listings linked to inbound USDC over the measured 30-day window reached 4,919, up 183 (+3.9%) week over week. The measure covers wallets scanned so far—3,005 of 3,232 listings with a wallet—and several listings can share one wallet. It is not an ecosystem-wide revenue total, and earning is not a subset of Live: paid APIs may answer with a 402 challenge instead of responding to a free JSON-RPC probe.
Measured gross receipts were $932,990.41. The median was $0.25, while the top 1 accounted for 63.3% of receipts and the top 10 for 88.0%; the Gini coefficient was 0.994. The HHI fell to 4,098 from 4,531 (-9.6%), but the broader distribution remains highly concentrated. More listings linked to recent receipts therefore should not be read as evidence that commercial returns are widely shared.
Merchant-facing agent commerce draws capital
On November 5, commerce platform firmly announced a $15 million Series A led by Squarepoint Capital and launched Ask Agent, a conversational shopping experience for merchant websites with product discovery, in-chat checkout and customer support. The launch puts capital behind a merchant-facing model in which agents mediate product selection and purchase, rather than only exchanging tasks or calling APIs. The announcement is company-reported; it does not by itself demonstrate transaction volume or protocol-level interoperability. firmly announcement
What to watch next week
The next comparison should distinguish a complete W46 payment cohort from this Monday-only intake snapshot, while tracking whether the live-probe gain persists. For commerce and infrastructure investors, the key evidence is whether growth in receipt-linked listings coincides with less concentrated receipts and more runtime-verifiable payment support.
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
3,544 of 6,977
payment-labelled agents (50.8%) 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 2,198 earning wallets backing 4,883 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| aidata | active | 42% | new |
| bitcoin+payment | very active | 40% | rising |
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 2026-11-09. 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 2026-11-09},
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, Mondays: earning wallets, observed inflow, new agents and the news behind them, with sources.
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