Reports
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State of the Agent Economy — July 2026
The whole measurable on-chain agent economy is about $23,500 in validated settled volume. The real story isn't the number — it's the gap between it and everything you've been told.
The whole measurable on-chain agent economy is about $23,500 in validated settled volume. The real story isn't the number — it's the gap between it and everything you've been told.
📅 Figures below are as measured the week of 2026-07-11 (UTC) — a point-in-time snapshot. For current live numbers, see the economy dashboard.
Welcome to the first State of the Agent Economy — our recurring, measured-on-chain read on what agents are actually paying each other, with the wash stripped out and the coverage disclosed. Every figure here is settlement we can verify on-chain across Base, Polygon, Arbitrum, Ethereum and Solana. Nothing self-reported, nothing estimated.
| Measure | This week |
|---|---|
| Validated settled volume | $23,515 |
| Raw on-chain (before wash adjustment) | $71,881 |
| Single-payer self-funding / non-production | $48,366 (~67%) |
| Real providers (wallets ever paid > $0) | 444 |
| Directory listings | 48,840 |
| Distinct payers | 1,004 |
The agent economy is real, and it is small — a low five figures of genuine settled volume, wrapped in a much larger cloud of self-dealing and test traffic. Two-thirds of the raw number is wash.
By raw volume, Solana leads by a mile ($46k across 215 wallets) — but most of it is a single wallet named ponzi402.com that received $30,731, nearly all of it from one payer. That is not an economy; it is a wallet paying itself.
| Chain | Raw settled | Wallets |
|---|---|---|
| Solana | $46,395 | 215 |
| Base | $10,392 | 225 |
| Polygon | $9,774 | 2 |
| Arbitrum | $5,319 | 2 |
Strip the wash, and the picture flips: the largest real earner is Bitrefill — an actual merchant (gift cards, phone top-ups) paid by many distinct wallets across multiple chains — with roughly $22,000. After that, it falls off fast. A working economy, today, is a handful of real services and a very long tail of zeros.
Concentration remains extreme (Gini 0.99; the top wallet is ~43% of all volume) — early markets look like this. We'll track whether it decentralizes.
Here's the honesty the crypto-native trackers miss: the on-chain economy we measure is a rounding error next to the real one. Most of the world's agent payments happen off-chain, inside Asian super-apps. Alipay alone reported roughly 120 million AI-agent transactions in a single week. JD.com, Tencent, UnionPay and Ant International are all shipping agent-payment rails; Mastercard's "Agent Pay for Machines" went live in Singapore and Malaysia.
We can't measure that settlement on-chain — nobody outside those companies can — so we don't pretend to. We track it as reported, not measured, and keep it strictly separate from our verified numbers. But you should know the shape of it: the measurable agent economy is Western and tiny; the real one is Asian and walled. The two rails may converge at cross-border stablecoin settlement — the frontier worth watching.
If someone tells you the AI agent economy is worth hundreds of millions on-chain, ask whose wallet it's in. This week, the honest, verifiable number is about $23,500, most of it one real merchant, atop a listing count that is 99.8% dead. That's not a knock on the space — it's early, and early is exactly when the honest baseline matters most. We'll publish it every week, on-chain, with the receipts.
Live figures: the Economy scoreboard · methodology: /methodology · who's really earning: the leaderboard.
These numbers update continuously on the Economy scoreboard, with the methodology at /methodology.