Cluster Protocol closed July at number 4 globally on the Base🔗 Leaderboard by active users.

Between a landmark thesis on private AI, a wave of high-signal partnerships, and a Base ecosystem ranking that speaks for itself, Cluster spent the month compounding proof points that are hard to ignore.

*Cluster currently sits at **number 4 globally on the Base Leaderboard by active users*🔗*, a ranking called out directly in response to Base's own list of reasons builders choose the chain. *

That standing is backed by real settlement volume. A recent 30-day window logged 130,000 inference payment requests and $79,000 worth settled payments, keeping Cluster inside the top ranks of x402 servers on Base. 🔗

Base Hub named Cluster one of the top ten AI projects on Base🔗 for the week, describing it as the marketplace bringing models, APIs, datasets, and compute together in one place.

AI on Base independently called Cluster the private, onchain model marketplace 🔗defining the category, comparing it to Hugging Face but built for agents, with private inference, tokenized datasets, and x402 payments baked directly into the flow.

Cluster announced it is building on Venice, the private-by-default AI platform🔗 where prompts are never stored and inference runs inside sealed hardware enclaves with cryptographic attestation. Cluster sits on top as the orchestration and settlement layer, routing sensitive workloads to Venice’s private compute with per-call payment over x402, no accounts and no data trail.

Cluster’s Chief laid out the full thesis for why private AI ends up on Base specifically. 🔗The numbers are staggering: over 100 million x402 transactions settled on Base within nine months, roughly 90 percent of all onchain stablecoin transactions by AI agents happening on that single chain, and the Linux Foundation formally taking x402 under governance with Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and AWS all bridging in. Cluster’s own receipts sit inside that momentum: CodeXero has shipped over 300,000 connected wallets and more than 25,000 dApps to Base, and its private AI inference layer has processed over 4 billion tokens.

Cluster hosted a Founder Podcast conversation🔗 with the @PeiChen01🔗, CEO, @TheoriqAI🔗, exploring how AI-managed vaults can generate yield on tokenized gold, and what the risk framework looks like when markets move against you.

Cluster opened the month with a sweeping thesis🔗 on why AI infrastructure in 2026 mirrors the fragmented computing world before AWS, and why the answer is one API spanning 500+ models, tokenized data, and compute, unified on Base with x402 settlement.

Qwen3.5 397B-A17B, a 397-billion-parameter model, went live on Cluster’s private inference stack🔗, powered by Phala’s Trusted Execution Environment, becoming the largest model available on the platform.

Cluster partnered with Primus Labs to close a real gap in agent infrastructure:🔗 agents already have identity through ERC-8004 and payment through x402, but proof that the data they acted on was genuine was missing, and Primus brings zkTLS into the stack to make it verifiable.

Cluster is also working with Mind Network🔗 to address a real weakness in open payment standards, since every agent transaction is public by default, which does not work for businesses operating at scale.

Tie it together and the month reads as validation on every front that matters: technical, financial, and narrative. Cluster is not just building a marketplace for models, data, and compute. It is positioning itself as the settlement layer underneath the entire agentic economy on Base, and July made a strong case that it is already there.