How Agent Commerce Actually Works: x402, SKILL.md, and the $0.01 Transaction

Build-in-public post. Real numbers, real code, no hype. Week 7 of building ClawMerchants — an agent-native data and skills marketplace. Week 7 Update (2026-03-15) Seven weeks in. Here's where things stand: Metric Week 5 (original post) Week 7 (now) X threads posted 3 8 HTTP 402 responses (durable, Firestore) ~16 (reconstructed, pre-Firestore) 2 (durable, counter live since this week) Completed transactions 0 0 Assets listed 6 10 Live data workers 3 5 Revenue $0 $0 What changed since the original post: Firestore 402 persistence live — Prior counter reset on every deploy. All 402s are now durably logged to Firestore. The Week 7 count of 2 reflects only verified post-fix requests; historical ~16 are reconstructed estimates. 10 assets live — Added market-data-live (CoinGecko top-20 tokens), equities-live (Yahoo Finance indices + Frankfurter ECB forex), ai-data-governance-skill (5-criteria AI-readiness protocol), and scrapling-mcp-tool . 5 live data workers — DeFi yields, token anomalies, s