252 receipts, $0.26: I re-ran a stranger's x402 numbers

Martin Pisacreta posted a receipt count yesterday: 252 settled sales, 56 from wallets he controls, 196 from 16 external payer addresses, and zero confirmed genuine customers at the time of his review. He was unusually straight about the limit of his own number — a payment is not a customer — so I wanted to know what his number is actually made of.

I re-ran it. His arithmetic holds: fetching receipts.json at 11:44 UTC today gives 253 sales, 56 ownWallet: true, 197 false, 17 distinct external payers. Same method, same result.

What isn't in the table is the money.

Not one external payer has ever paid more than one cent. Two hundred and fifty receipts is a real number. Twenty-six cents is also a real number, and it is the one that answers his question.

Two of the biggest payers are not customers

I looked up the addresses that account for 81 of those 197 external sales, on Base.

0xe827…50a0 (44 sales). Between 23:40 and 00:03 UTC on Oct 26 that address sent 139 USDC transfers to 22 different recipients. Median transfer $0.0010. 97% at or below one cent. Total spent in the burst: $0.44.

0x2465…a1b1 (37 sales). 138 USDC transfers in three minutes, 28 distinct recipients, median $0.0013, 96% at or below a cent, $0.49 in total.

That is the sweep pattern Hasan Malik described on Oct 31: a few wallets touching hundreds of sellers at a tenth of a cent a call. Different sellers, same fingerprint.

One that doesn't fit

0x097e…475a (1 sale). 23 USDC transfers to 7 recipients spread across Oct 3 to Oct 31. Median $0.05, largest $1.00, $9.30 total. Not a sweeper shape. Could be a person testing, or an agent with a budget and a shopping list. The chain does not say which, so neither will I.

The edges

• 139 and 138 are the most recent pages I could page through on Base Blockscout, not lifetime counts. The shape of the finding does not depend on the exact totals; the magnitude does.
• Addresses are not people and not customers. "Sweeper" is a description of behavior, not an accusation.
• I could not check Hasan's five wallets. He did not publish the addresses, so his 293 sellers and ~1,250 payments a day are his numbers, not ones I confirmed.
• I re-ran one stranger's feed. That is not a survey of x402.

What I take from it

Receipt count measures catalog presence. Payer count measures how many addresses touched you. Neither is demand. The distribution of amounts is the closest thing to demand you can read off a chain, and almost nobody publishes it.

If you're putting an x402 traction number in a post or a deck, pull the amount distribution first. The count flatters you. The median tells you what you actually have.