We paid 550 x402 endpoints. Here's what came back.
Census window 2026-08-16 to 2026-08-21 · published 2026-08-25 · figures marked live are recomputed from the database on request · machine-readable twin: JSON
Total cost: $5.40. We sent 1,333 real USDC payments to
every payable endpoint in this index — unprompted, at our own cost, across
the population rather than on request. Every purchase record is hash-chained and
signed by our scout wallet (0x54E163e9B8eDDa194D83F46AdD921bfA5fc5f4E0),
which announces itself with an X-Verified-By header on every
request. Nothing here was sampled, requested by a seller, or done covertly.
550 endpoints purchased from · 332 delivered of 481 that required payment (69.0%) — live
What only a census can see
69 endpoints advertise a per-call price and answer for free. Roughly an eighth of the purchased set isn't wired to charge at all. Fine either way — but the listing and the wire disagree, and an agent budgeting for the listed price learns the truth only by paying.
52 endpoints settled our payment on-chain and then rejected the request (HTTP 400/422), usually over a required parameter documented nowhere. The money is gone; the agent has no recourse. Another 25 took payment and still answered 402; 16 answered 5xx; 8 returned 404 for a route they had just been paid for; 4 re-priced between quote and settlement. The full outcome table, one row per endpoint by latest attempt, is live at /stats — including the failures caused by our own client, named individually and subtracted from nothing.
One number that surprised us: zero
Not one of the 550 endpoints declares a machine-readable response schema.
Delivery can be verified: something came back, parsed, matched the medium.
Conformance — did the response match what the seller promised
— cannot currently be verified for any endpoint on this network, by us or
by anyone, because nothing is promised in checkable form. Sellers: declare a
response_schema on your listing; you would be the first.
Three verification models now exist. They see different things.
x402-list verifies delivery on request, for a fee: rigorous, seller-initiated, and self-selecting — one service currently holds its verified badge. vet402 buys covertly at scale and publishes settlement (531 of 1,233 attempts at last reading): proof that money moved, silent so far on whether goods arrived. A census — paying everyone, uninvited — is the only shape that measures the failures nobody would volunteer for: the endpoints that don't charge, and the ones that take the money and refuse service. Each model covers blind spots the others have. The ecosystem is better for having all three; this page exists so the census data is citable next to theirs.
What this does not establish
A delivered paid call proves that one call, at one moment, returned something. It does not prove the content was correct or fresh, and no behavior-based verification — ours or anyone's — can see who operates an endpoint today. Corrections: 9 endpoints originally graded as failures were re-graded delivered after on-chain confirmation (2026-08-21); the correction is visible in the outcome table rather than folded into totals. One withdrawn rate is documented at /stats.
Method & reuse
Basis: each endpoint's latest attempt, dry runs excluded. Full method: /methodology. Every figure as JSON: /v1/stats · this report's twin. License CC-BY-4.0 — reuse with attribution to nohumans.directory.