instrument 02 · sellers advertising paid resources over x402
Who actually sells?
A registration says an agent exists. It says nothing about whether anybody is selling anything, or whether a single payment has ever been made. This instrument asks the sellers directly. x402 is the protocol an endpoint uses to answer “this costs money, here is where to pay”; the census enumerates the endpoints that advertise it and checks what happens when you ask.
What counts as a seller
the unitOne seller is one payment address behind one host. The same address behind two hosts is two sellers; one host quoting two addresses is two sellers. A seller that rotates its address becomes a new seller, deliberately — the rotation is information, and blending it away would hide it.
Sellers are enumerated from named catalogs, because every catalog is partial and nobody publishes the union. Which catalogs are read is part of the method: adding or removing one changes the population and is a changelog event, never a quiet edit. So this measures the advertised economy, and says so.
What gets asked
not a strict ladderListedswept
Which catalogs advertise this seller, and since when?
The population is the listed, so this rung is evidence rather than a verdict.
Every catalog is partial and nobody publishes the union, so this is the advertised economy, not the whole of it.
internal: listed
Reachableswept
Does the host answer at all?
Any HTTP response counts as a pass, including a 4xx or 5xx: the question is existence, not health.
internal: reachable
Quotesswept
Asked for the resource, does it name a price it can be paid at?
A spec-valid 402 naming a scheme, network, amount, asset and this seller's own payment address, judged against a pinned x402 spec commit.
A 402 here is the seller working, not refusing — it is the protocol stating what something costs.
internal: quotes
Deliversnot yet run
Paid for real, does the resource actually arrive?
The only rung that spends money, under rules published before the first purchase: a capped amount, one purchase per seller per sweep, from a wallet named in advance.
Never attempted. No figure on this site describes anything bought, delivered or undelivered.
internal: delivers
Receiptedreserved
Designed against the x402 offers-and-receipts extension, and held out of the locked method until that extension stabilises. It enters by changelog.
internal: receipted
Settledswept
Has this payment address ever actually been paid?
On-chain settlement history at a pinned block — first and last settlement, how many, and from how many distinct payers.
Scoped to a stated block window on one chain, so a fail means "nothing in that window", never "never paid". Distinct payers is the load-bearing figure, not the count.
internal: settled
Consistentswept
Does the endpoint quote what the catalog advertised?
Price, description and schema compared field by field against each catalog that lists it; a disagreement between two catalogs is itself evidence.
internal: consistent
What this will not measure
stated in advanceNot measured, on purpose: revenue, dollar volume, uptime, latency, and the quality of anything delivered. No score, no rank, no badge. Nothing publishable is purchasable.
Politeness is part of the method rather than a setting: robots.txt binds every request this instrument makes, including the payment handshake, with no carve-out for “the protocol’s designed use”. A host that disallows us is recorded as having refused, and that is never counted as a failure of the seller.
Why there are no numbers here
yetThe method is locked, and the first full sweep has run and is stored. What does not exist yet is the part that would let you check the figures: no public endpoint serves the seller tables, so there is nothing here to recompute a number from.
AgentCount does not print a figure whose evidence a reader cannot pull. The counts publish when the archive and the endpoint behind them do — the same order every figure on this site went through, and the reason the method was published before the first seller was enumerated.