OceanAltOceanAlt

Agent Payment Observatory

Narrative density index: what the field is talking about, and how fast. Each bubble is a term; its area is the term's density in this week's corpus (hits per thousand items); its colour is the layer. Every number comes from our own continuously collected corpus (not web-wide popularity); method and definitions here.

Period 2026-W38 (not frozen yet)Items this week 765 · publishers 138Base 2026-W28 = 100Download this week's raw CSV

Bubbles drift and collide; area = this week's density, colour = layer. Hover for numbers, click for the trend.

Identity & authorizationPayment protocolsCompliance & riskPayment networksStablecoin settlementMerchant toolsBank & incumbent pilotsRegulators & working groupsFaded = insufficient sample this week; numbers only, no conclusions

Ranking (density this week)

  1. 01Stablecoin92.8‰26-72%
  2. 02x40219.6‰166+92%
  3. 03USDT15.7‰24+54%
  4. 04Agentic payments11.8‰40+15%
  5. 05USDC7.8‰19-23%
  6. 06Base7.8‰—
  7. 07Agentic commerce6.5‰110-36%
  8. 08MiCA5.2‰5-93%
  9. 09Sanctions screening3.9‰—
  10. 10Arc3.9‰—
  11. 11GENIUS Act3.9‰17-92%
  12. 12MCP2.6‰44
  13. 13KYA2.6‰—
  14. 14ERC-80041.3‰—
  15. 15Prompt injection1.3‰4-87%
  16. 16AML1.3‰—
  17. 17Tempo1.3‰—
  18. 18Mastercard Agent Pay1.3‰—
  19. 19MAS (Singapore)1.3‰—
  20. 20FATF1.3‰—

Columns: density ‰ · index (base = 100) · 8-week change

Emerging (fastest-growing, last 8 weeks)

  1. ACPfirst 2026-W31new
  2. ERC-8004first 2026-W37new
  3. KYAfirst 2026-W37new
  4. Agent identityfirst 2026-W37new
  5. Agent walletfirst 2026-W36new
  6. Travel Rulefirst 2026-W35new
  7. Arcfirst 2026-W31new
  8. Coinbase AgentKitfirst 2026-W37new
  9. FATFfirst 2026-W33new
  10. Tempofirst 2026-W23+152%
  11. A2Afirst 2026-W28+106%
  12. Basefirst 2026-W22+59%

Curated term list only; no automatic tokenisation, which would mistake noise for discovery.

How to cite

OceanAlt Agent Payment Observatory, 2026-W38, https://oceanalt.com/en/observatory · method obs-v1.0

Every period keeps a permanent URL; frozen weeks are never recomputed, and source changes only affect unfrozen weeks. Machine access: /api/observatory/index?term=x402 · /api/observatory/bubbles · /api/observatory/emerging