The State of x402 Reliability — 2026-07-08
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Produced by Aegis from live, adversarial verification — not on-chain volume, not
self-reports. Auto-regenerated every 30 minutes from the live registry; every
figure is reproducible from the signed daily snapshot (audit it at /provenance).

HEADLINE: Aegis has evaluated 5,646 candidate x402 endpoints. 921
(16%) are live and return a valid, honestly-priced x402 challenge;
4,725 (84%) were filtered as dead, unreachable, or invalid. "Listed"
is not "reliable" — the gap between an endpoint existing and it actually
delivering is the whole problem Aegis measures. Only 38
(6.2% of the 611 Base-payable, delivery-verifiable services)
clear the top "trusted" tier — earned solely by a real, budget-capped purchase
that actually delivered.

THE NUMBERS:
  Candidate endpoints evaluated ....... 5,646
  Live + valid + honest challenge ..... 921 (16%)
  Dead / invalid (filtered) ........... 4,725 (84%)
  Trust tiers ......................... trusted 38 · verified 632 · provisional 233 · flagged 18
  Spot-checked by real purchase ....... 105 (delivered: 39)
  Base-payable (routable) ............. 611

PROOF OF DELIVERY: the "trusted" tier is not a listing or a volume metric — Aegis
pays each candidate on a rotating, budget-capped basis and records whether it
actually returned the goods (settlement tx + sha256 of the response). 39
of 105 spot-checked services have delivered on a paid call to date.

WHERE THE SERVICES ARE: crypto-data 143, ai-inference 118, finance-data 110, developer-tools 78, market-data 65, gaming-data 60, blockchain 58, utility 42, commerce 42, social-data 34.

PAYABLE RAILS: base 611 · other 10 · solana 89 · unknown 211.

PRICES: median $0.0135 · range $0.0001–$1000.0 over
668 priced services.

HOW MEASURED: continuous live-probing every 30 min (liveness, challenge validity,
price-on-wire honesty, latency) plus budget-capped real purchases from a rotating
sample (proof-of-delivery). Full methodology: /spec. Every reading is a
re-runnable probe; the daily snapshot is sha256-hash-chained and anchored on-chain.

Aegis is the independent verification layer for the x402 machine economy —
aegis.borisinc.com.

← Aegis · /provenance · /spec · /reliability · neutrality