Two services drove 96% of x402 settlement address changes in 90-day study
A 90-day analysis of the x402 payment protocol directory tracked over 8,000 changes across 630 listed services, revealing 1,077 settlement address (payTo) rotations in total. Nearly all of that activity was concentrated in just two services: Tavily Search alone accounted for 964 rotations, cycling to a fresh wallet address every 16 minutes for ten consecutive days in late July and early August. A second service, altahub-vivarium, followed the same 16-minute rotation rhythm on a smaller scale with 82 changes over roughly 22 hours. Stripping out those two outliers, the remaining 628 services produced only 31 address changes across 22 services over the entire 90-day period. The findings warn that AI agents caching a payTo address at scrape time risk sending funds to a stale wallet, since the discovery document is designed to be re-fetched at the moment of payment.
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