Who earns on Stripe and who earns on x402: verified startup revenue against agent payments

Neither rail publishes its merchants. Two sites publish what they can see: TrustMRR shows revenue that startups let it read straight from Stripe, RevenueCat or Paddle, and x402scan indexes every x402 payment, the stablecoin payments an agent makes per request, as it settles on Base or Solana. We read both on 12 November 2026, and the program that read them is one any MCP client can call, so every figure below can be fetched again.

In TrustMRR’s top 100 by monthly recurring revenue, 81 startups are paid through Stripe, for $10.13M a month. All of x402 moved $1.77M in 30 days, and 44% of it went to sellers that one wallet paid. Take those out and agents bought about $0.84M from 44 sellers, less than one Stripe startup, Stack Influence, collected on its own.

TrustMRR ranks startups by MRR, and each startup’s page names the provider its revenue was read from. Stripe carries 81 of the top 100. RevenueCat and Superwall, which bill through the app stores, carry most of the rest, and those are mobile apps.

A figure on TrustMRR is the last one it read. When a founder’s key expires the page keeps showing it, so eleven of the 81 Stripe startups carry figures more than 30 days old. Stan, first on the board at $3.57M a month, was last read on 20 April. Without those eleven the Stripe column is $5.29M.

MRR counts subscriptions. What a startup collected in the last 30 days counts everything, and the four largest collectors take far more than their MRR: Stack Influence collected $872k against $28k of MRR, because brands pay it per campaign. Among the subscription businesses, Postiz grew 53% in a month to $444k, and 1Lookup, an API that checks phone numbers and addresses, collected $512k.

By category, AI tools hold the most Stripe MRR across the most startups: 22 of them, for $2.01M. Stan alone would put creator tools first, on figures from April.

An x402 payment is an HTTP request that carries its own payment: the server answers 402 with a price, the agent signs a USDC transfer, and a facilitator such as Coinbase settles it. x402scan sums them by window. The last 30 days are 3% of everything x402 has ever moved.

The 100 largest sellers took $1.74M of the $1.77M, so ranking them accounts for nearly all the money. Many of them are not businesses. The largest received $719,000 in nine payments from one wallet, through FluxA, and a cluster of addresses on Meridian took about $10,000 each, from five to eight buyers apiece. Splitting volume by how many buyers paid each seller separates those from sales.

Base carried 84% of the volume and Solana the rest. Coinbase settled $850k, and FluxA $770k, almost all of it the one transfer.

A seller has a name on x402scan only if it lists itself in the x402 Bazaar. Of the 5,658 listed services, 15 took $1,000 or more in the last 30 days and 48 took $100. The largest named one is not an agent tool: laso.finance turns stablecoins into prepaid and gift cards. After it come speech and calls (dTelecom), research at two cents a call (AX1), and model gateways that charge under a cent.

The 81 Stripe startups in the top 100 collected $12.89M in the last 30 days, seven times all of x402, selling subscriptions and orders worth tens to thousands of dollars. x402 sellers charge per call: BlockRun about $0.006, AX1 about $0.02. The one x402 seller paid like a Stripe business, dTelecom, took $36,672 from 29 buyers, about $1,260 each.

What sells differs too. On Stripe it is AI software, marketing and education, sold to people. On x402 the money is in turning crypto into spendable money (laso.finance, Bitrefill) and in infrastructure sold to agents: speech, models, data. The same kinds of tools earn on Stripe already. 1Lookup, an API, collected more in a month than any x402 seller paid by more than one wallet.

We read both sources on 14 October for what people and their agents pay for. x402 volume rose by nearly two thirds since, from fewer buyers and far fewer sellers, and laso.finance, then the largest seller, took about half as much.

Every figure here came from the payments program in hedwigai’s shell. Add mcp.hedwigai.com to your MCP client, turn the program on once, and send these to its bash tool. Reading costs nothing.

TrustMRR’s ranked list needs an API key whose terms forbid republishing it, so the program reads each startup’s public page instead. These are the 100 slugs of the top 100 on 12 November 2026. Passed in one call, they give the provider table above in by_provider.

The program calls these toolkit routes, which take the same fields as JSON. The schema is at toolkit.hedwigai.com/payments/openapi.json.

TrustMRR is not a census. Founders choose to list, the largest companies on Stripe do not, and a page whose key expired keeps its last figures. The top 100 is ranked by MRR, so a startup that sells one-off orders can collect more than one on the list and still be missing from it.

x402scan counts every USDC transfer a known facilitator settles. A transfer between two wallets of one owner looks like a sale with one buyer, and one buyer with a thousand wallets looks like a market. The ten-or-more-buyers split is a filter, not a proof. Sellers that do not list themselves have no name, and two of the four largest are unnamed.