There's an AI gold rush underway in Silicon Valley, but early pioneers of agentic-micropayment systems like x402 protocol appear to be panning for pennies.
Zaryab Afser, a software developer and researcher who writes for Decipher Club, estimated in a post on Wednesday that the median x402 merchant earned about 6 cents over a month.
"Not six cents a call — six cents in total, for the entire month," Afser put it dryly.
The analysis for Decipher Club covered a 2,252-merchant snapshot, and the total settled revenue for the period came out to $76,279.84, "roughly the price of one mid-sized engineering salary," according to Afser.
He blamed low prices, weak repeat demand and discovery rankings that favor sellers with existing sales. For decentralized AI, the question is who controls which services agents find, even when payments are open.
Part of the reason that the volume is so low is that x402 allows microtransactions, allowing for tiny payments to go through. The median price across the x402 catalog is 1 cent.
"A merchant needs 10,000 successful agent calls a month to earn $100," Afser wrote.
The x402 protocol, an open standard that uses blockchains for payments, without needing the approval of banks, could help to decentralize agentic commerce. But for now, the traffic is paltry, a sign of just how early the technology is.
in last 30 days
- median merchant earned 6 cents in a month.
- most merchants had 2 unique buyers only.
- 4 out of every 5 merchants earned less than 1 dollar
there are some obvious ( acceptable ) answers for this,
but only one of'em Show more on X
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