A relatively new payments provider called Dexter has quietly surged to the front of the pack in handling x402 transactions, eclipsing Coinbase to become the largest daily facilitator for the protocol. The shift was called out in a Hashed data release and reflected on a public Dune dashboard, which shows that since mid-December, Dexter’s share of daily x402 activity has risen steadily and now represents roughly half of all daily transactions.
x402 itself is an internet-native payments standard designed to revive and modernize the old HTTP 402 “Payment Required” idea. The protocol makes it possible for web services, APIs and autonomous agents to request and verify instant stablecoin settlements over ordinary HTTP flows, enabling tiny, programmatic payments without the friction of account signups or traditional payment rails. Coinbase and other contributors have published documentation and tooling to support the rollout, and an open x402 ecosystem has begun to form around that work.
Major Competitive Shift
The numbers are notable because x402 is still in its early adoption phase, yet traffic has already concentrated among a small group of facilitators. According to the Dune analytics and Hashed’s reporting, there are now four facilitators that have each processed more than 10 million x402 transactions: Coinbase, Dexter, PayAI and DayDreams. That concentration suggests a fast initial clustering of demand around a few services that provide the on-chain settlement and verification plumbing x402 needs.
Dexter’s rise to roughly 50% of daily transactions marks a rapid competitive shift. While Coinbase still ranks highly in cumulative totals and remains a foundational figure in the x402 ecosystem, Dexter’s growth trajectory over the past few weeks has been enough to flip the daily leaderboard. Industry watchers say such swings are not unusual in young infrastructure markets, where integration speed, pricing and developer ergonomics can quickly sway usage toward one provider or another.
The practical implications matter beyond leaderboard bragging rights. x402 is explicitly pitched as a payment rail for machine-to-machine commerce: AI agents requesting paid API inferences, IoT devices buying compute or data, or services charging per resource delivered. Having multiple, reliable facilitators competing for volume could lower costs, increase resilience and accelerate adoption as builders experiment with pay-per-use models. Cloud and infrastructure partners that support x402 tooling have also signaled interest in making the standard easier to adopt, which could amplify that dynamic.
For now, the clearest public view into this experiment is the Dune dashboard and related analytics that track facilitator rankings, chain splits and token denomination. Those live metrics let observers see how traffic patterns evolve day-to-day and which providers are winning the small, automated payments market that x402 aims to unlock. Whether Dexter can sustain its roughly 50% share as the field matures, or whether a new entrant or pricing change will shake things up, is a question the next several weeks of data should answer.
