Are x402 health labels accurate?

Q: Are x402 health labels accurate?

Of 955 endpoints 402index labelled degraded or down, 754 — 79% — returned a valid payment challenge on every independent probe we made in late August. 52 labelled healthy never returned one. On 1 September the last_checked stamps on the disagreeing labels were hours old, so staleness does not explain what follows.

Answered from the issue named below, as published on its date. A later issue is a later answer, at its own address.

The answer

Of 955 endpoints 402index labelled degraded or down, 754 — 79% — returned a valid payment challenge on every independent probe we made in late August. 52 labelled healthy never returned one.

The population this figure was counted over

(2) The OBSERVED population: every endpoint on probe402's seed that produced at least one graded observation inside the sealed window of 21–31 August 2026, joined to a third party's published label for the row whose address is the exact route we probe; an endpoint we did not grade, or whose label read failed, is outside every joined figure and is counted rather than dropped.

On 1 September the last_checked stamps on the disagreeing labels were hours old, so staleness does not explain what follows.

The sentence above is quoted from a published issue and is not re-written here. Its date, its population and the record behind it are below.

What this does not say

Third-party figures are those providers' own published numbers, quoted with their own denominators and the date we read them. They are not our measurements of those providers.

The evidence

What ran, when, and the record it produced.

What ran	When	Record
The join behind the issue's opening finding: every independently graded endpoint of the sealed window set beside one fresh dated read of the health-label surface, covering all 1,588 hosts we cover, with that surface's own last-checked stamp carried per row.	2026-09-01	`158940a9769dd5b44614f9f9201235f708388e7b0fdae0a589e3fd063798be1a`

Sealed days behind the archive figures: 11
Observations in that window: 29,022
Issue: Machine Commerce Reality Index: #001 — August 2026
Published: 2026-09-03

The published chain heads · Read the issue · Answers

The terms

The terms this question uses are defined in the glossary.

payment challenge · status class · 402index

Corrections and disputes

This answer names a party we measure. The route to dispute a reading is on the corrections page.

Corrections to this issue are on the corrections register, and this answer reads from the record rather than from a copy.

The corrections register