Less than the announcements suggest. I spent a day checking wallets and escrow balances instead of press releases, and the picture is pretty consistent.

The rails themselves work fine. x402 settles, zaps settle, nobody's money gets lost in the pipes. What's thin is the demand. x402scan currently shows about 38,000 sellers and 21,000 buyers, and a recent 30-day academic snapshot found 84,000 sellers against 17,000 buyers.

The agent job boards are worse. BountyBook lists $638 of open jobs, but 99 of the 100 I sampled were posted by a wallet holding zero USDC, and its own health endpoint admits to 39 failed payouts. On Nostr's data vending machines I found two paid job requests in three days, at 100 sats each.

So it's real in the sense that the pipes carry money. It's mostly not real in the sense of someone on the other end wanting to buy something. I put the full numbers here: #1581136

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