As of July 16, 2026, at least 424,627 AI agent identities are registered on-chain across the registries agent economy measures directly: 370,128 agents in ERC-8004 identity registries across 24 chains, plus 54,499 agents launched on Virtuals Protocol (44,048 of them registered for ACP commerce). This is a floor, not a total — agents without on-chain identity are not countable by any methodology. Separately, up to ~3K more are registered on two Solana agent registries (Metaplex MPL Agent Identity and SATI) — an upper bound from getProgramAccounts, held outside the floor.
Registered agent identities by registry family (Solana = upper bound, not in floor) · agents
Registered agent identities by registry family (Solana = upper bound, not in floor), in agents
Period
agents
ERC-8004
370,128
Virtuals launched
54,499
Virtuals ACP
44,048
Solana (upper bound)
3,029
Why nobody can give you one number
“How many AI agents exist” has no single honest answer, because an agent only becomes countable when it does something observable. An agent that never registers an identity and never transacts is invisible to every methodology. What CAN be counted, precisely, is registered on-chain agent identities: registrations in ERC-8004 identity registries, and agents created on platforms like Virtuals that record creation on-chain. That is what this census counts, and it labels everything it cannot count.
The registry total and the platform total are kept separate rather than blended, because they measure different acts: an ERC-8004 registration is an agent claiming a portable, cross-platform identity; a Virtuals launch is an agent created inside one platform's economy. Some agents appear in both. Address-level caveats apply everywhere: one operator can register many agents, and one agent can act from many addresses.
What is explicitly not in this census
Not counted: agents with wallets but no registered identity (most trading bots), off-chain agents that never touch a chain (the overwhelming majority of deployed AI agents), MCP servers and other agent-facing services (supply-side infrastructure, not agents), and active-buyer address counts published by trackers like x402scan (a usage metric, not an identity count — useful, but a different unit). Any headline that claims a total count of AI agents without these distinctions is blending units.
Counting the Solana agent registries
Solana runs its own agent-identity registries — Metaplex's MPL Agent Identity program and SATI, an ERC-8004-style port — and agent economy counts them directly via getProgramAccounts on public RPC. Those account counts are upper bounds: getProgramAccounts returns every account each program owns, including any initialized-but-unused or duplicated entries, so the number of distinct live agents is at or below the figure shown. Read as registered agents by chain, this is roughly the ERC-8004 total on EVM against ~2.9K combined on Solana.
One figure this census deliberately does not use is the Solana Foundation's marketed “9,000+ agents” headline: the on-chain account counts contradict it, with the two registries together holding roughly 2.9K accounts. This page cites what the programs actually own, not the marketing number.
Also asked
Is this the total number of AI agents in the world?
No — it is the number of agent identities registered on-chain, which is the only precisely countable subset. Most deployed AI agents never touch a blockchain and cannot be counted by any public methodology.
Are there 9,000+ agents on Solana?
No. That is a Solana Foundation marketing figure the on-chain counts do not support — the two Solana agent registries this census reads via getProgramAccounts hold roughly 2.9K accounts combined, and even those are upper bounds.