October at Agentic Finance Graph: signed passes, a Merkle-sum ledger, and the corrections we made in public

Agentic Finance Graph published its October 2026 edition of State of Agent Money, reporting that agents seen paying (L7+) rose from 5,505 to 27,897 and agents still funded with $10+ in stablecoins (L8+) grew from 441 to 746. The project signed its Agent Pass with Ed25519 as of 24 October, moved counted payment totals into a signed Merkle-sum log of about 2.9 million leaves, and disclosed a correction removing 274 loop-return payments worth $1,818,739.78, cutting the counted total from $56.66M to $54.84M. It also shipped a pre-payment policy check (gate_check) in the AP2 constraint vocabulary and a test-then-drain detector, and exposes 25 tools and 5 prompts over a free, read-only MCP server.

We run an independent ledger of the money AI agents hold and spend, measured from the chain: Base in full, plus ERC-8004 registrations and owner payments on six other chains. October was the month it grew up. Here is what changed, with the numbers, the corrections, and two calls you can run yourself. Our published figures carry a definition at agenticfinancegraph.com/def/<id and a measurement time. October figures come from the frozen edition, State of Agent Money, October 2026. | | 1 Oct | 31 Oct | |---|---|---| | Agents seen paying, L7+ rank.l7plus.v2 | 5,505 | 27,897 | | Still funded with $10+ in stablecoins, L8+ | 441 | 746 | | Three or more independent counterparties in 30 days, L9 | 69 | 124 | pay.usd.total.v3 . rank.costtofake.v1 , which is why the ladder has L8 and L9. The Agent Pass is signed. Since 24 October every Pass that holds is signed with Ed25519: eight checks on an agent at one moment, valid three hours, listing what held, what failed and what could not be checked. About 25,000 agents hold one. The public key is at /.well-known/afg-pass-keys.json . curl -s -X POST https://agenticfinancegraph.com/mcp \ -H 'content-type: application/json' \ -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"agent pass","arguments":{"agent":"67733"}}}' The answer says holds or not, never "safe": "it does not say the agent is safe, honest or well run, and nothing in it predicts the next three hours." Totals are a Merkle-sum tree. Counted payments are leaves of a Merkle-sum log about 2.9 million at the last head , ordered per agent, and the head is signed. A skeptical client can check the signature and walk a leaf to the root: curl -s -X POST https://agenticfinancegraph.com/mcp \ -H 'content-type: application/json' \ -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"verify sum log","arguments":{}}}' Monthly books and a frozen edition. October's books closed at 05:00 UTC on 1 November. The edition is one JSON file whose SHA-256 enters our signed statement log an RFC 6962 Merkle tree with Ed25519-signed heads , rendered as a page and a PDF. It reconciles itself with the book: payments of the month whose receipts were read after the book closed are counted and named, because the book is never rewritten. A change register. Changes of method and coverage, and corrections, are dated entries at /api/changepoints , each with its measured size and a "comparable from" date. A small job runs PELT changepoint detection over our own series and flags any step that no entry explains. pay.excluded.loopreturn.v1 . One agent received about 1.83M USDC through a fee router and sent almost all of it back to the address that sent it and to addresses that funded it. Our loop rule only compared transfers between agents' own wallets, so we had counted it: 274 payments, $1,818,739.78, removed; the counted total went from $56.66M to $54.84M. gate check : a policy check before a payment in the AP2 constraint vocabulary, answering block, warn, log or allow with every reason. The client decides; we never block. detector.test then drain.v1 : a payment of at most $5 to a new address, then the drain to the same address within six hours. {untrusted: true, source, text} , and the server tells AI clients to quote them, never follow them. Of 41,728 wallets bound to L7 agents, 2,029 are EIP-7702 delegated: 683 to Coinbase's EIP7702Proxy, 556 to MetaMask's stateless delegator, 97 to Uniswap's Calibur, 94 to Alchemy's semi-modular account, among others. Names identify contracts, never the agents on them. agenticfinancegraph.com/mcp : 25 tools, 5 prompts, free and read-only, with recipes for seven agent wallets in the same client. AgenticFinanceGraph/agentic-finance-graph-spec . No token, no positions in tokens we discuss, no paid placement; findings are public before any paid depth. Read the edition at agenticfinancegraph.com/state-of-agent-money-2026-10, check a Pass, verify a total, and tell us where we are wrong.