Methodology
Every listing is measured by one uniform, public rule — so results are comparable, neutral, and recomputable from public sources.
Verantis measures each service on two independent layers. The first asks is it live and payable right now? The second asks has it earned trust through real, sustained use? A service can pass one and not the other; we report both, and never blend them into a single opaque score.
Two independent layers — live verification and earned on-chain reputation — reported separately, never blended into one opaque score.
We send an unpaid probe to each service and read the HTTP 402 Payment Required challenge it returns. That challenge declares how to pay and how much — so a single unpaid request tells us whether the endpoint is reachable, whether it genuinely asks for payment, and whether its live price matches what it advertises. We never send payment to verify.
Each listing is classified strictly by what was observed:
Listings are re-probed on a schedule. Because we keep every probe, each service accumulates an uptime and price-stability history — a continuous record that cannot be back-dated.
For services that settle on-chain, we read their public settlement history and measure sustained use over a fixed 90-day window, so services are compared on equal terms rather than by lifetime totals that favour whoever has been around longest. Within that window we look at distinct buyers, payment count, volume, repeat rate, and how concentrated the buyers are.
These signals map to a reputation tier — established, building, watch, unproven, or inactive — reflecting how much independent, repeated settlement a service has actually attracted. We currently read USDC settlement on Base and Solana.
We disclose the boundaries of what we can see rather than paper over them:
Machine payments are not one rail. Verantis probes x402 and the Merchant Payment Protocol (MPP) today, with additional rails curated as they mature. Neutrality across rails is deliberate: a directory that covers only one ecosystem cannot be a trusted map of the whole.
Verantis has no rail of its own, no token, and no stake in any listed service. The same rule is applied to every listing, our dataset is git-committed, and it is periodically anchored to Bitcoin so the record's timing can be independently checked. Anyone can recompute our findings from the same public sources — the strongest guarantee of neutrality is that you don't have to take our word for it.
Classifications describe what our probes and on-chain reads observed at a point in time and can change between checks. Nothing here is financial, investment, or legal advice. Verantis reports observations to help humans and agents make their own informed decisions.