Independent measurement for machine commerce
We measure what machine commerce actually does.
probe402 independently observes machine-payment infrastructure over time, retains the evidence, and publishes what the record shows — not what providers claim.
Why independent measurement
Discovery tells you what exists.
Providers tell you what they claim.
Payment records tell you what settled.
We measure what actually happened.
None of those says what happened when a machine actually tried to transact: whether the endpoint answered, what it quoted, whether the request could be built from what is published, and whether a payment bought anything usable. That gap is what probe402 measures, and the measurement is kept.
What we measure
Five questions, asked of known machine-payment endpoints on a clock.
- Does it answer?
- What does it quote?
- Can an agent actually construct the request?
- Does observed behaviour match the published claim?
- Once a payment settles, is the answer usable?
What the record produces
One measurement capability feeds everything published here. Observations become retained evidence; the evidence supports published research and individual answers; and the same discipline is applied, on request, to a specific system as an independent audit.
- Observation
- The instrument records what each endpoint did at each check, from our own vantage, and never edits a reading afterwards.
- Evidence
- Every capture is kept and dated, and each closed archive day is sealed into a chain, so each sealed day can be checked against the head published for it.
- Research
- The Machine Commerce Reality Index is written from that record, each finding tied to the dated evidence behind it.
- Audit
- The same measurement discipline, applied on request to one endpoint, host or question, as an independent audit.
Latest research
Machine Commerce Reality Index #003 ·
What machine commerce claims — and what actually happens
MCRI measures what publicly listed machine-payment infrastructure claims, what it actually does, and where the two diverge.
What the issue found
- From $50,331 in transfers to an estimated $32,300 in customer purchases
- One host accounted for most of the increase in Bazaar listings
- Some low-price routes rejected their own published example after payment
Machine Commerce Conditions MCC-001 What Does a Machine Need to Know Before It Spends Money?
The evidence
Every finding has a record behind it.
Every published finding rests on an observation we made and kept. Endpoints are observed repeatedly rather than once; the bytes that came back are retained; every record is dated; the rule that graded it is versioned and published; a mistake is corrected in the open rather than rewritten; and each closed archive day is sealed so that it cannot be altered quietly.
See how the evidence is kept → · Explore the evidence record →
Independent audit
Need to know what your machine-commerce infrastructure actually does?
Independent audits apply the same measurement approach to a specific endpoint, host or question, with additional scoped testing where needed.