who's familiar w Goodhart's law? in essence: "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" (h/t @samrags_) x402 servers figured out how to circumvent our gamed txn flagging methodology (which wasn't too difficult tbh), so we rebuilt it the old method only caught obvious circular flows, but this second iteration uses a combination of heuristics that make it much more robust in identifying gaming patterns so w these improvments in flagging this gaming, the story looks different now: 1) x402 gaming is still rampant -- servers just got better at hiding it. 2) @base clearly has demonstrated the most consistent x402 activity, @0xPolygon's recent strides in fostering agentic x402 activity are real, and ~86% of @solana's all-time x402 activity is gamed (the below chart filters out gamed txns) 3) when filtering out gamed txns, Infrastructure & Utilities is now the dominant category for genuine x402 activity -- this includes servers like (by @t54ai), @AgentLISA_ai, (by @merit_systems), @BetoraPro (the below chart filters out gamed txns) 4) @PayAINetwork is facilitating the most real x402 activity (the below chart filters out gamed txns) there are many ways to react to this data. sometimes inflating numbers is part of the playbook, especially early on when you're trying to demonstrate traction or bootstrap a network effect. but if we're serious about x402 and agentic payments being adopted on the largest scale, we need to see through the noise. i'm not trying to call anyone out -- i'm trying to bring attention to the right signals and the teams actually shipping legitimate use cases. identify the real builders. the real use cases. the real momentum. that's how the space moves forward x402.

it'll be interesting to see what this chart looks like when we filter out more of the noise the revamped 'gamed vs real' analysis i've been working on over the past few weeks is almost ready stay tuned.

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