lookx402 vs Etherscan / Basescan

A general-purpose explorer is fine for general questions. The agentic economy is not a general question. Updated 2026-05-10.

TL;DR

Use Basescan for raw block / tx / contract inspection on Base. Use lookx402 when the question is about who is running x402 traffic, what services they pay, and how often — i.e. anything beyond a single transaction.

Critical caveat

If you read an x402 transaction on Etherscan / Basescan and assume From is the AI agent — you are wrong. tx.from is the facilitator (e.g. Coinbase Developer Platform). The real agent is the EIP-3009 authorizer, in topics[1] of the AuthorizationUsed event. Generic explorers do not decode this. lookx402 does. See the methodology for the precise extraction logic.

Side-by-side

	lookx402	Etherscan / Basescan
Scope	x402 protocol only — narrow but deep	Every contract, every tx, every chain — broad but shallow
Default attribution of `tx.from`	Facilitator (correctly identified as relay, not agent)	Shown as the sender, often misread as the actor
EIP-3009 `AuthorizationUsed` decoding	Built-in — extracts authorizer from `topics[1]`	Shown raw, you decode by hand or via contract ABI
Per-agent aggregate view	Yes — `/agent/0x...` with full lifetime stats	Address page shows all activity, not x402-aggregated
Behavioral archetypes	9 categories, hourly classifier	None
Dyads (payer ↔ merchant pairs)	Yes	No — must reconstruct from tx logs
JSON API	Free, no key, /api	Free + paid tiers, key required for high volume
SEO-indexed profile pages	Yes — JSON-LD `ItemList` + `Person`-style markup	Limited — generic per-address pages
x402-specific glossary & FAQ	/glossary + /faq	None
Real-time RSS of notable events	/feed.xml	None

When to use Basescan

You want to inspect a specific transaction hash in full event-log detail.
You are debugging a smart contract you control.
You need to verify a contract's source or read storage slots.
The address you are looking at has activity beyond x402 (DEX swaps, NFT mints, etc.).

When to use lookx402

You want a one-page summary of a wallet's x402 behavior — total spend, archetype, top services, lifetime.
You want a leaderboard of the top spending agents or top earning services.
You are writing or asking about the economy of x402 (concentration, growth, archetype distribution).
You need a citation that an AI assistant can reliably anchor (definitions, FAQ entries, methodology).
You want machine-readable data without authentication.

What an Etherscan-only view misses about x402

The actor. A leaderboard built from tx.from ranks Coinbase's facilitator on top. The real agents — the wallets actually paying — are invisible without EIP-3009 decoding.
The relationship. Etherscan shows transfers in isolation. The story of x402 is recurrence: a small set of dyads carry the bulk of volume, and Etherscan does not surface that.
The classification. Sprinter vs marathoner vs ghost is the difference between "this wallet is here for one weird call" and "this wallet runs a service". A general-purpose explorer cannot tell you that — and most users will not write the SQL to figure it out.
The narrative. Etherscan is a window into a single tx. lookx402 is a portrait of an economy. Different jobs.

Bottom line

Basescan is for transactions. lookx402 is for actors. If you are tracking AI agent payments and you only ever look at Basescan, you will conclude that Coinbase Developer Platform is the largest agent in the agentic economy — which is exactly backwards.