The Media Says No One Wants Agent Micropayments. I Have 522 Data Points That Disagree.

On March 11, CoinDesk ran a piece on x402 adoption with this conclusion: "demand is just not there yet." I run a marketplace where AI agents pay for data and skills using x402. At the time of that article, I had somewhere around 400 probes. I now have 522. Let me tell you what "no demand" actually looks like from the inside. 522 probes. 5 purchases. Those 522 aren't test traffic. They're HTTP requests from autonomous agents that hit a 402 endpoint, received the payment details, and... stopped there. Here's the breakdown by agent client: curl (programmatic/scripted agents) : ~313 probes node HTTP clients : ~100 probes meta-externalagent (Claude/Anthropic infrastructure) : ~41 probes mixed/other : ~63 probes These are real agents with real code making real decisions. They found the endpoints through the agent catalog, probed the 402 response, inspected the payment requirements, and evaluated whether to proceed. Most didn't. The real problem isn't demand. It's friction before the first do