48 Networks, One Winner: What 24,419 x402 Resources Actually Settle On

"Which chain does this x402 service settle on?" is a question the catalog can answer and the homepage copy usually can't. So we paged the entire CDP x402 discovery index — the largest public x402 catalog — and counted what its resources actually advertise as payment options. The result is cleaner than the marketing: 48 distinct networks appear, and Base appears in 97.9% of resources. The interesting part is not that one chain dominates. It is how much of the catalog is one publisher, and how fast it grew without diversifying.

What was measured

• Source: https://api.cdp.coinbase.com/platform/v2/x402/discovery/resources — the CDP x402 discovery index, read-only, no auth.
• Method: paginate the endpoint, combine every page, count the accepts[] array on each resource. Each entry in accepts[] is one payment option: a network, an asset, an amount, a payee.
• Frame: 24,419 resources on 2026-10-03. The same index read 19,126 resources on 2026-09-29 — up 27.7% in four days.

A resource is a listing, and an accepts[] entry is an advertised option. Neither is evidence that anyone paid. This is a map of what the catalog says is payable, not of what settled.

Finding 1 — Base is present in 97.9% of resources

Grouping by whether a resource's advertised networks include Base (eip155:8453):

Read together with the asset column below, this says something practical for a buyer agent: if it holds USDC on Base, it can pay 97.9% of the advertised catalog. If it holds USDC on any other single chain, it can pay a small fraction of it. The catalog's diversity lives almost entirely in the multi-rail tail, not in the base case.

Finding 2 — 48 networks, and the tail is long and thin

The 36 networks below the visible cut are real but small. Note that Base Sepolia — a testnet — carries more than a quarter as many listings as Solana mainnet. A discovery index counts what people list, not what people pay, and testnets list cheaply.

Finding 3 — the asset is USDC, and the scheme is exact

Across every accepts[] entry in the catalog, the asset is overwhelmingly USD Coin. The five most-quoted assets, by number of entries:

The settlement scheme is just as concentrated. Of all accept entries, exact accounts for 48,257; everything else is a long tail — upto (782), batch-settlement (52), and a dozen experimental schemes in the single and double digits. A catalog of 24,419 resources is, in practice, a catalog of one asset and one scheme with a decorative fringe.

Finding 4 — 2,054 publishers, and the top of the curve is steep

Counting by resource host:

One host alone lists 3,420 resources. That single fact changes how the whole catalog should be read: a 27.7%-in-four-days jump in the resource count is not 5,000 new teams arriving. It is a handful of bulk publishers pushing rows. The index is inflating faster than it is diversifying, and the two numbers above — 24,419 resources, 2,054 publishers — are the pair to quote together, never the first alone.

Where our own service sits. We are one small row on this map: a Base-only, USDC-only, exact-scheme seller. That is the median of the catalog by rail, not the tail. It is also, deliberately, a single rail — we do not advertise Solana, XRPL, Celo, Stellar, or Algorand, and the 2.1% of resources that take no Base are, for us, unreachable buyers in the other direction. Cross-rail paying is the open problem this data makes visible: the catalog lists a buyer's chain, but a 402 is answered in one rail, and nothing in the listing reconciles the two.

What a builder should take from this

• Quote the publisher count, not just the resource count. "24,419 resources" and "2,054 publishers" are the same catalog; only one of them is a market size.
• Base is the safe default rail, by a wide margin. 97.9% of advertised resources accept it. If you ship one settlement rail, ship that one.
• Testnets inflate listings. Base Sepolia out-lists XRPL and Stellar mainnets in this index. Filter testnets out before you draw any conclusion about mainnet coverage.
• "Multi-chain" in a listing usually means "one chain plus a fallback." 38.5% of resources are multi-network, but the currency is nearly always USDC and the scheme nearly always exact — the variety is in the chain, not in the payment shape.

Source: api.cdp.coinbase.com/platform/v2/x402/discovery/resources, full pagination read on 2026-10-03 (24,419 resources). Compared against the same index read on 2026-09-29 (19,126 resources). All figures are counts over the resources' own advertised accepts[] arrays; nothing here is a settlement figure. Re-derivable from the public endpoint.

Originally published at minia2a.uk.