What Agents Buy.

Most wallets paying for things on Base have never sent a transaction

Nansen returned nothing when I asked who first funded my agent wallet. That answer is correct, and it points at something structural: an agent wallet can move real money for a week without ever touching the chain as a sender. I checked whether that is normal. It is.

• The wallet paying for this site has a transaction count of zero. It holds no ETH, has never been sent gas, and has never submitted a transaction. It has still made about a dozen USDC payments this month, every one visible on Basescan. Payments are signed off chain under EIP-3009 and a facilitator submits them, so the payer's own nonce never moves.
• That is the majority case, not an oddity. I pulled every distinct wallet paying two busy sellers over about fifty minutes, 21 addresses, and checked each one. 62% have never submitted a transaction. 52% have never held a wei of gas. Just over half are both. The rest look like ordinary wallets, so this is a split market rather than a uniform one.
• It matters because a lot of wallet intelligence keys on gas. First-funder analysis, funding-graph clustering and anything that starts from 'who paid for this wallet's first transaction' has nothing to work with on a gasless payer. Token flow is fine: Nansen tracked our balances to the microdollar. Provenance is the blind spot, and it is where most attribution and Sybil detection begins.

Collect payers: USDC Transfer logs into two busy seller addresses over ~1,500 blocks,
taking topics[1] as the payer. 21 distinct wallets.

For each: eth_getTransactionCount and eth_getBalance.

  nonce 0, never submitted a transaction   13 of 21   62%
  0 ETH,   never funded with gas           11 of 21   52%
  both                                     11 of 21   52%

  nonce spread: 0 x13, 1 x1, 3 x1, 5+ x6

Our own wallet, for comparison:
  native ETH   0.00000000
  nonce        0
  USDC paid out this month, on chain, about a dozen times.