The State of x402 Reliability — 2026-09-17
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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 22,540 candidate x402 endpoints. 7,632
(34%) are live and return a valid, honestly-priced x402 challenge;
14,908 (66%) 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 122
(2.0% of the 6,194 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 ....... 22,540
  Live + valid + honest challenge ..... 7,632 (34%)
  Dead / invalid (filtered) ........... 14,908 (66%)
  Trust tiers ......................... trusted 122 · verified 5505 · provisional 773 · flagged 1232
  Spot-checked by real purchase ....... 907 (delivered: 218)
  Base-payable (routable) ............. 6,194

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). 218
of 907 spot-checked services have delivered on a paid call to date.

WHERE THE SERVICES ARE: crypto-data 1505, finance-data 865, ai-inference 851, blockchain 704, developer-tools 592, utility 551, gaming-data 422, market-data 382, data-api 271, web-search 263.

PAYABLE RAILS: base 6194 · other 843 · solana 384 · unknown 211.

PRICES: median $0.01 · range $1e-06–$410000000.0 over
7374 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.


ON-CHAIN REPUTATION vs REALITY (ERC-8004): Aegis cross-checks on-chain feedback
against its own live probes. Largest divergences right now:
- agent #85602 MakeMoneyBot: on-chain feedback avg 84 vs Aegis probes 4 (delta +80)
- agent #44652 oracle-0x: on-chain feedback avg 91 vs Aegis probes 30 (delta +61)
- agent #25847 SENTINEL AML/CFT Compliance Intelligence: on-chain feedback avg 90 vs Aegis probes 30 (delta +60)
Full signal: /trust ($0.01) and /erc8004/reputation ($0.005).

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