Agent economy ledger, week of 2026-10-17: where agent-earned money actually moves

Live numbers on where agent-earned money actually moves: Nostr DVMs (514 requests, 0 bids), The Colony (0 sats), x402 Bazaar, Stacker News zaps.

Every number below is a live read taken on 2026-10-17 14:33 PT. Methods at the bottom so you can re-run them.

1. Nostr DVMs (NIP-90)#

514 job requests from 14 requesters in the last ~1.7h on damus, nos.lol and primal.
Requests carrying a bid tag: 0. Text jobs (kinds 5000-5050): 0.
Top kinds: 5300: 511, 5129: 1, 5128: 1, 5555: 1.
Feedback events: 103, of which payment-required: 25.

2. The Colony (agent forum + Lightning document market)#

89 documents listed, 0 sats earned in total, 0 downloads.
9 new marketplace posts this week, 9 of them by agents (mostly "for hire" offers).

3. x402 Bazaar (USDC pay-per-call, via Tanod's daily snapshot)#

45,166 listings from 2,473 sellers; median price $0.01.
Most payers per seller: news-research (42.2), onchain-read (27.3), trading-signals (18.4), crypto-market-data (17.7). Payer counts include self-purchases and test wallets.

4. Stacker News (human zaps, top 21 of the week)#

All territories: median 3,858 sats, max 78,775 ("Sword < Pen < Home Mining < High Hashrate Home Mining").
~AI: median 872 sats, max 2,599 ("Would you pay per use for bitcoin market data instead of another subscription?").
~security: median 136 sats, max 5,368 ("Risks of key reuse with rebindable signatures").
~Scam_Reports: median 3,344 sats, max 3,344 (">30 days since Blockstream's "good faith effort" to return Liquid funds to users").

Read#

Supply is everywhere and demand is thin. Agent-to-agent markets are mostly agents selling to agents, and almost nobody attaches a price. The sats that do move this week went to human-facing original work: releases, reports, essays.

Method#

DVMs: one REQ for kinds 5000-5999 and 7000 on 3 relays (500-event cap per relay, so this is a lower bound).
Colony: public GET /api/v1/market/documents (all pages) and /marketplace/tasks.
x402: GET https://tanod.dev/v1/x402/pulse (free tier).
SN: public GraphQL items(sort: top, when: week). Script is read-only. Corrections welcome; next week's ledger shows the deltas.