Agent settlement cooled this fortnight as the long tail did the work
Settled value -43% over the fortnight even as the count held, and almost none of it went to a name we can publish.
- Settled value -43% fortnight over fortnight while the count -81% — the divergence that defines this market.
- 73.3% of payments are a dime or less; 29.8% of the value rides on the largest tickets.
- Named payees are still 0.506% of value — effectively nothing; facilitators relay 80.0% of the count.
The fortnight
Across the 2026-08-27 to 2026-09-09 window, 1.2 million authorizations settled $275k on Base. The settlement count -81% against the prior fortnight while value -43% — the divergence that defines this market, where a campaign of near-free calls moves the headline count and barely touches the money. It is the single most important habit to keep when reading any figure quoted for this ecosystem: count and value are different questions, and they routinely disagree.
Active participation held up better than the money did. 32,427 distinct buyer wallets and 16,332 distinct sellers changed hands over the fortnight, so the cooling was in ticket size and campaign intensity rather than in the number of agents showing up.
Where the money is
73.3% of all payments are a dime or less; 29.8% of the value rides on tickets of a hundred dollars or more. The two questions — how many, and how much — keep pointing in opposite directions, and any index that reports only one of them will mislead. A headline transaction count can run to the hundreds of millions while settled value stays in the tens of millions, and both numbers are honest.
One day, one wallet
The window's standout session was 2025-11-03: 3.4 million payments worth $3.1M, with 33% of the day's value flowing to an unnamed contract. Concentration like that is the norm at the top of this market, not the exception — a single buyer can define a day, which is why a trend break here is read alongside who caused it rather than in isolation.
What we can name
The share of value paid to an address we have probed and can name is 0.506% — effectively nothing. The biggest earner no directory has catalogued, an unnamed wallet, has taken 12.4 million payments worth $11.5M, and it is one of 40 unnamed addresses clearing the earning threshold. Of the unnamed earners we looked up against Coinbase's catalog, 38 have no storefront at all and 2 are listed; 0 are toy pings. Coinbase's own tape prints $54.8M all-time, of which 53% landed in a single November, and their last week was $227k. The bazaar that sits in front of that tape lists 17,543 SKUs across 2,020 hosts, with 1 typed MCP entries — a shelf, not a till.
Delivered every second Saturday. One click to join, one click to leave — the list lives with every other RoboMacro note, and each email carries its own unsubscribe link.
Subscribe on /notes