On August 25, the x402 rail settled 1,172,496 payments in a single 15-hour reporting window, per x402scan's tracker — an all-time record for the series, roughly six times the rail's typical pace, and 38% above the previous high set nine days earlier. Sustained, that's about 22 payments per second for 15 straight hours.
Total value moved in the record window: $38,771. Average payment: three cents.
The biggest day in the protocol's history barely registered in dollars — and that gap is the most interesting number in the whole dataset.
The shape of the spike
We log rail-level stats daily for the Rail Pulse strip on our homepage, so we have the full 30-day window in front of us: x402scan publishes the ecosystem's settled transactions in ~15-hour buckets.
From late July through August 15, the rail ran a steady baseline — roughly 100,000 to 200,000 payments per bucket, average payment between $0.07 and $0.45.
Then August 16 happened: 641,000. Then 815,000. For a solid week the rail ran at four to six times baseline. Around August 22 it cooled — sliding all the way down to 88,000, then 54,000, well below the old baseline, like the flood had switched off.
Then the August 25 bucket printed 1.17 million. As we write this, the next window is at 971,000 with an hour still to run — the second-biggest bucket ever, chasing the record set the day before.
The money didn't follow
Here's the part that should recalibrate how you read agent-economy headlines: dollar volume never left its band. Every bucket this month — baseline, surge, record — moved between $10,000 and $66,000. Transaction count went up 6×; money did not.
What actually moved was the average payment size, and it moved down: from a baseline of $0.07–$0.45 per payment to about three cents during the floods.
The strangest detail is the quiet stretch on August 24, right before the record: the rail did just 88,000 payments in a window — but at $0.45 each, the highest average ticket of the month. The slowest day moved more money per payment than the biggest day by a factor of thirteen.
In other words, there are two economies running on one rail:
- A steady money layer — modest transaction counts, higher-value payments, remarkably consistent dollar throughput.
- A bursty machine layer — enormous counts of two- and three-cent calls that switch on, hammer the rail at 20+ payments per second for days, and switch off.
The record wasn't commerce growing. It was a workload arriving.
Who's actually flooding the rail
A three-cent average at hundreds of thousands of calls per window is the signature of agents paying per-request for cheap endpoints — data lookups, inference calls, per-item fees — in a tight loop. And this month, the buyers behind loops like that stopped being hypothetical:
- AWS made Bedrock AgentCore Payments generally available on August 18 — production agents on Amazon's stack can now discover and pay x402 endpoints automatically, with a curated bazaar of pay-per-use endpoints built into the console.
- Ramp switched on agent wallets on August 20 for its 70,000+ business customers, funding and auditing agent spend on Solana.
- Gateway aggregators like BlockRun — a single endpoint that routes and pays for 55+ models and APIs — now generate a huge share of raw transaction count. Circulating analyses of the Base-tracked series put BlockRun alone at roughly three-quarters of recent transactions; we haven't independently verified that split, but it matches the shape we see.
- The surge window also overlaps the widely reported stretch in which Solana passed Base on daily x402 counts. We can't pin the record bucket on one buyer — but as we noted when the flip made news, our catalog crawler still finds 98.5% of live x402 listings settling on Base. Throughput is workloads; catalogs are builders.
A scale note that makes the point sharper, not weaker: x402scan's tracker — our series above — is a subset of the ecosystem. x402.org's official counters currently report 75.41 million transactions, $24.24 million in volume, 94,060 buyers and 22,000 sellers over the last 30 days. Even at that scale the arithmetic holds: that's about $0.32 a payment ecosystem-wide, and researchers who measured the x402 population directly — "How Agentic Is Agentic Commerce?" — found activity extremely concentrated and warned that settlement counts alone can't prove organic adoption. Twenty-two thousand sellers are real. So is the fact that a handful of industrial-scale machine buyers generate most of the count.
It reached our little corner too
We run 19 paid x402 services, and external buyers normally reach us in bursty sweeps — one to six settles a day, with multi-day gaps. Inside the surge window we logged our two busiest external-buyer days of the month: 15 settles across five different services on August 17 (three distinct payer wallets), and 15 again across five services on August 24, hours before the record bucket printed. The dollar total for those sweeps was pocket change — which is exactly the point. Somebody's agents are walking the catalog, buying the cheap calls, everywhere, including here. The flood isn't a rumor happening on someone else's dashboard; it knocked on our door on its way through.
The usual caveat, because it always applies
All of this is indexer-reported data, scraped from x402scan's published stats and logged daily by our collector — the same discipline that let us catch an "all-time" volume counter shrinking 97% last week. We publish the numbers as the indexer states them, keep our own history so revisions can't hide, and label everything self-reported until proven otherwise.
The live version of every figure in this post updates daily on the Rail Pulse strip on our homepage.
A million payments in 15 hours means agents are out there buying, three cents at a time. If you run an API, the question is whether they can find you, trust you, and pay you — our free scanner checks all three in about a minute.
