State of Agent Money: September 2026

The registry

16,013 registrations were minted on Base in September 2026, taking the Identity Registry from 84,954 to 96,480. Our count is checked against The Graph's Agent0 subgraph at the exact end of every UTC day: 0 of 0 days agreed exactly. The ten largest minting accounts held 29.9% of all registrations at the start and 35.1% at the end; n/a of the agent files in our probe sample sit on one host.

The ladder

Levels are observations, not judgements. L7 means a wallet bound to the agent paid someone after it registered, with money that left the agent's control; L8 adds that the wallet still holds at least $10 in stablecoins; L9 adds three or more independent counterparties in 30 days. Agents seen paying went from 31 to 5,505 in the period; part of that rise is our payment reader catching up on wallets flagged earlier, which the change register dates.

The money

93,673 counted payments worth $7,654,905 were made by 7,060 agents in September 2026; $4,653,465 of it left the payer's control. 8,576 transfers ($31,648,112) were routing hops and 3,226 ($246,548) were made before the agent registered; neither is counted. 86,217 of the counted payments were read more than three days after they happened, which is our lag, not the market's; the final edition states that number as the last word.

Where the money went

The fifteen addresses that received the most counted agent money in the period, with our label where we have one. A label is our attribution from public sources, not a statement by the address's owner.

The rails

The x402 submitter job read 0 settlements ($0) into 0 Bazaar-listed sellers from 0 payers in the period, 0 of them submitted by a sender that was neither the payer nor a listed facilitator. transactions read by the daily submitter job (a sample of transfers into Bazaar sellers); the stock x402_settle_txs_24h is the count found.

Attacks and exposure

22,121 look-alike addresses were planted into the payment histories of 827 agent wallets; 2 payments ($60) went to a look-alike. 185 detections were logged, 0 of them onboarding moves (a registration handed from the minting account to its holder within a day), which are info only and never live incidents. 0 incidents were live at the end of the period. A detection is a pattern with evidence for a human to read, never a verdict.

What we changed

2 entries in our change register are dated inside the period, 1 of them corrections of an earlier entry. A step in a series at one of these dates is ours, not the market's; each entry names the series it moves and, where measured, the size of the move.

Our own checks

The data-quality suite ran 58 times in the period with 2 blocking failures and 71 warnings (37 checks at the end; health 95.4%). 0 statement windows were signed; the log head at the end of the period had n/a leaves. 36 of 37 public feeds were on time when this edition was produced (late: BNB registration owners' payments).

What this edition does not assert

• That a registration is a working agent, or that a level is a judgement of the people behind an agent.
• That counted payments are commerce: deposits into the agent's own positions and bridges back to the payer are inside the counted set and shown separately.
• That any detection is a verdict: each is a pattern with evidence for a human to read.
• That the period's per-day payment figures are complete on the day of production: payments read late are added to the day they were made, and the final edition says how many were read late.

Verify this edition

• The file. Every figure on this page comes from state-of-agent-money-2026-09.json; its SHA-256 is d0d78f60d546e963b14209dfa71fef108d7c217c2f80eef57f000a6c690a1a78.
• The working papers. Every agent, payee and figure behind this edition is a 30¢ pack: buy it on the Desk (sign in with a wallet first), or for an agent GET /check/edition?period=2026-09.
• The log. The final edition's hash is a leaf of our signed statement log: publication/1|state-of-agent-money-2026-09|d0d78f60d546e963b14209dfa71fef108d7c217c2f80eef57f000a6c690a1a78|…. afg logwatch verifies the log's heads and consistency from outside; the leaf list is at /api/statements/log.
• The chain. Registrations and payments can be re-counted from any Base node; afg chaincheck <agent> does it for one agent from a public RPC we do not run, and afg editioncheck 2026-09 re-derives this edition's registration figures at the period's own blocks and confirms the file's hash in the log (open-source CLI, 0.3.3).
• The definitions. Each figure's definition id resolves at /def, frozen; a change of method is a new version and a dated entry in the register, never a silent edit.
• The PDF. The same edition as a paper: afg-state-of-agent-money-2026-09.pdf, built from the same file.
• Independence. Agentic Finance Graph has no token; AFG and its operator hold no position in the tokens discussed; nobody pays for a level, a rank or a placement; a finding is public before any paid depth of it is sold (stated 24 October 2026, the manifesto).