The State of x402 Reliability — 2026-08-23
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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 17,536 candidate x402 endpoints. 4,756
(27%) are live and return a valid, honestly-priced x402 challenge;
12,780 (73%) 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 131
(3.6% of the 3,623 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 ....... 17,536
  Live + valid + honest challenge ..... 4,756 (27%)
  Dead / invalid (filtered) ........... 12,780 (73%)
  Trust tiers ......................... trusted 131 · verified 3485 · provisional 777 · flagged 362
  Spot-checked by real purchase ....... 431 (delivered: 218)
  Base-payable (routable) ............. 3,623

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 431 spot-checked services have delivered on a paid call to date.

WHERE THE SERVICES ARE: crypto-data 936, ai-inference 677, finance-data 573, blockchain 412, developer-tools 374, gaming-data 345, utility 246, market-data 228, web-search 167, commerce 143.

PAYABLE RAILS: base 3623 · other 652 · solana 270 · unknown 211.

PRICES: median $0.01 · range $1e-06–$350000000.0 over
4501 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 #44652 oracle-0x: on-chain feedback avg 92 vs Aegis probes 30 (delta +62)
- agent #60741 Tenjin: on-chain feedback avg 89 vs Aegis probes 30 (delta +59)
- agent #47261 anchor-x402: on-chain feedback avg 86 vs Aegis probes 30 (delta +56)
Full signal: /trust ($0.01) and /erc8004/reputation ($0.005).

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