Definitions
Every word AQUIX publishes, defined once — with how it is computed and what it
equals today. The methodology page argues; this page defines. If you quote AQUIX, quote from
here: each entry is a rule, not a paragraph.
Every figure below is read from the published register at build time. None is typed.
The money words
Received, all routes
Every USDC dollar that arrived at an address, by any route — x402 or otherwise.
how it is computedSum of USDC credited to the address across its whole life on Base.
today$374,754,349.42 across 521 published addresses
x402 revenue, rail-verified
The subset of received dollars that arrived through an x402 payment we can reconstruct — a USDC transfer whose transaction also carries an EIP-3009 AuthorizationUsed event naming the same party that sent the transfer.
how it is computedSum of settled amounts from the settlement store. It is the smaller number and the one the site leads with.
today$16,687,289.06 — 4.45% of all receipts
Outflow
Every USDC dollar an address ever sent out, in any transaction, at any time. Lifetime, not per-payment.
how it is computedSum of USDC debited from the address. USDC only — value that left in ETH or another token is not in it.
Retained (Kept)
Received minus outflow, clamped at zero. What the address still has.
how it is computedGREATEST(received − outflow, 0). Clamped, so an address that spent more than it received reads $0 rather than a negative — which makes retained an upper bound that can never understate.
today$564,467.78 — 0.15% of everything received
Pass-through
Structural, not lifetime: the address forwards the money onward inside the very transaction that paid it.
how it is computedMeasured per transaction. ★ Not the same as outflow. An address can be 100% outflow and 0% pass-through — it earned the money and spent it later.
Retained and processed are never summed. They measure different things. A
payment processor can move enormous volume and keep almost none of it, so adding the two would
count the same dollar twice and flatter the plumbing.
The verdict words
How to read a verdict
Figures are measurements. Received, kept and settled amounts are reconstructed to
the cent from public Base chain state.
A verdict is a classification: our judgement, reached by published rules from
those figures. It describes how money behaves at an address. It is not an endorsement, an
accusation, or a claim about who operates the address.
Every verdict is shown with three things beside it: how strong
the evidence is, what we know about identity, and
whether the address is published in the register.
Pages published before 2026-09-17 use earlier labels: Verified — service =
Service · Verified — conduit = Conduit · Verified — circular flow =
Circular flow. The verdicts themselves are unchanged; only the words on the badge changed.
Service
Paid through x402, and not identified as a router, a rail, or wallet software.
how it is computedMost services were admitted by one of our named rules for organic payment behaviour — payments arriving in varied amounts, at irregular intervals, with no circular flow. A minority reach this verdict by default: no named rule decided them, and less than 30% of what they received went back to the addresses that paid them. 432 of 456 were rule-admitted in this snapshot; 24 were not.
★ The verdict describes how an address was admitted, not how much it keeps. 220 published addresses keep less than 0.05% of what they receive; the Kept figure on each page is the measurement.
today456 in this snapshot · evidence: behavioural
Conduit
A payment router, rail or facilitator, identified by its role in the protocol or by a published deployment. Money moves through a conduit by design.
how it is computedThe test is a role, not a pattern: an address is a conduit because it has been identified as a router or a rail, never because of how its money moves. An address can forward almost everything it receives without being classified as a conduit — its page says so when that happens.
today21 · evidence: attribution
Circular flow
30% or more of everything the address received went back to the addresses that paid it, and no named rule for organic payment behaviour applied. Its volume overstates the demand it represents.
how it is computed★ A statement about the money, not the operator. Value returning to the same counterparties is what a trading agent, a settlement loop or a refund flow looks like. It is not an accusation. The share is measured on everything received, over the address’s whole history.
today31 · evidence: behavioural
Wallet software
A wallet product rather than a business, identified by its bytecode or by a published deployment, never by heuristic alone.
how it is computedWallet software is published so readers can see it rather than being quietly dropped. Like every other row, it is ranked by the x402 revenue we can verify.
today13 · evidence: attribution
The three things shown beside every verdict
One verdict answers one question: what does the money do at this address?
Everything else is a separate axis, and is shown separately.
Evidence strength
How much data stands behind the verdict — not how good the address is.
how it is computedHigh — more than 50 distinct payers and more than 20 distinct payment amounts. Medium — more than 5 distinct payers. Low — five or fewer. Measured on a sample spread across the address’s whole history, not a recent window.
Thin evidence — the verdict rests on a single sampled payer. It may still be right, but it is the weakest evidence we publish, and every page it applies to says so.
today97 high · 177 medium · 247 low · 173 thin
Identity
Named — a public name exists, with its source shown: a Basename, an x402 directory declaration, an ERC‑8004 registration, or a published deployment. Unnamed — no public source names this address.
how it is computed★ Whether any address is operated by an AI agent is not verified. On-chain records show that a payment settled, not who or what decided to make it. A name is a claim about the name, never about the operator.
today84 named · 437 unnamed
Name verified
A second, independent signal agreed about the NAME — never about the address, and never about the operator being trustworthy.
how it is computedEither a Basename resolved on-chain (cryptographic, not self-reported), or a service name the operator declares in a public x402 directory and serves from its own registered domain — two independent signals.
today27 of 521
Register status
Whether an address is published, and if not, what we did about it. An address has exactly one current status.
how it is computedIn the register — published, carrying one of the four verdicts above. Reclassified as wallet software — kept in the register, carrying the wallet verdict. Removed from the register — infrastructure — identified as protocol infrastructure and kept out of every total. Examined, not admitted — looked at, and not published. Not examined — known to us, not yet assessed.
These are the statuses the code actually holds. “Undecidable” is not one of them — it is a census class, on the different axis described below.
today521 in the register in this snapshot
The census and the register use different classes
The census sorts every address paid on x402 in a seven-day window by what
its money did. The register publishes only addresses that pass all our tests, with a verdict. The
two vocabularies are not the same, and one word appears in both.
★ “Conduit” means different things on the two axes. A census
conduit is detected from forwarding onward inside the same settlement transaction. A register
conduit is a router or rail identified by its role. An address that receives and sweeps the
money later counts as an earner in the census and could still be a service in the register. The
names are kept as they are, and the difference is stated here rather than hidden.
| Census class | What it means | Closest register outcome |
|---|
| Earner | Paid on at least five days of the window, across at least ten payments. | Service |
| Conduit | Forwards onward inside the same settlement transaction on almost every receipt. | Conduit — but detected differently; see the note above. |
| Bot-shaped | Paid on many days, almost all at a single amount, averaging well under a cent. | Examined, not admitted |
| Passenger | One or two payments on a single day — rode inside a settlement transaction rather than being paid as a business. | Not examined |
| Infrastructure | Named on a published rail or disburser manifest. | Removed from the register — infrastructure |
| Undecidable | Too little activity to say, and the census says so rather than guessing. | Not examined |
The census thresholds are set in code and have not been ruled, so they are described
here in words rather than published as fixed numbers. The census changes nothing: it never moves an
address into or out of the register, and it carries no verdict.
The measurement words
Measured day
A day the observatory actually ran and read the chain end to end.
how it is computedA day it did not run is absent, never plotted as zero. Every percentage on this site is an average per measured day, never a window total — a total counts a morning we did not run as zero.
Unmeasured
We did not look, or could not finish looking.
how it is computed★ NULL means unmeasured, never zero. The two are reported differently everywhere on this site, because a gap and an absence of money are different facts.
Exact / upper bound
Whether a figure is the true number or a ceiling on it.
how it is computedReceived and payment counts are exact where the walk completed. Retained is always an upper bound: it is clamped at zero and counts USDC only.
Final through <date>
Coverage proved by the watermark, not claimed by the calendar.
how it is computedA day is published only once its blocks have been read contiguously.
Payer
A distinct address that sent USDC to this one.
how it is computedCounted from the enumerated inbound stream. Where the count could not be completed, the page says so rather than publishing a ceiling as a fact.
today3,676,290 payments recorded across the register
Membership — who is in the register
In scope
The address has at least one x402 settlement AQUIX holds on-chain evidence for.
how it is computedThe settlement store is the membership test. Sampling is a fallback only where no settlement is held, and may never override held evidence.
The register
The published set: addresses that passed the classifier, the sybil gate and the scope test.
how it is computed★ It is small on purpose. Most addresses on a payment rail are not businesses, and a register that claimed otherwise would be measuring traffic and calling it commerce.
today521 published, of which 84 carry a public name
Removed
Addresses that are the rail rather than paid by it: payment-protocol contracts, merchant disbursement plumbing, wallet infrastructure.
how it is computed★ A hand-maintained backstop, so it can only ever contain what we have already gone and found. It is not a filter that catches this shape automatically.
What AQUIX does not claim
That any address is an AI agent
It cannot be proven from chain data, so we do not assert it.
how it is computed"Agent" is the name of the category. What is verified is economic behaviour — money arriving on the x402 rail, and what became of it.
That this is all of Base
The chain carries far more than x402.
how it is computedAn address whose inbound is not x402 — a router, a bridge — is excluded here even when it is very large.
2026-09-18
Evidence before trust