Do x402 endpoints change their price or payment address?
The short answer
Yes, a minority do, and some do so often. Across the observed window a small number of endpoints changed the address they asked to be paid at, and a somewhat larger number changed their price.
As published in the issue
Of 6,835 endpoints quoted 21–31 August (22,318 observations), 33 changed their payment address between observations (281 changes; one endpoint changed on nearly every observation) and 73 changed price. A buyer relying on a cached quote — price or address — could act on obsolete terms.
(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.
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.
Why it matters
A buyer acting on a cached quote can pay the wrong amount, or pay the right amount to an address that is no longer the one being asked for. Quote freshness is a property that has to be measured rather than assumed.
What we measured
We took every endpoint that quoted a price across the observed population in the sealed late-August window and compared consecutive quotes from the same endpoint, counting each change of price and each change of payment address.
What the evidence shows
- Sealed days behind the archive figures
- 11
- Observations in that window
- 29,022
- Issue
- Machine Commerce Reality Index: #001 — August 2026
- Published
11 days
2026-08-21 · 2026-08-22 · 2026-08-23 · 2026-08-24 · 2026-08-25 · 2026-08-26 · 2026-08-27 · 2026-08-28 · 2026-08-29 · 2026-08-30 · 2026-08-31
All 11 days behind these figures (21–31 Aug 2026) are sealed, each with its published hash on the Integrity page; each date opens that day's manifest.
What this does not say
- Nothing here is a statement that a sale completed. A payment challenge shows that a price was offered in a machine-readable form; it does not show that anything was paid or delivered.
Method and reproduction
The runs behind the figures, the record each one produced, and the terms this question uses.
What ran, when, and the record it produced.
| What ran | When | Record hash |
|---|---|---|
| Every quoted observation of the window compared with the one before it on the same route: price movements and payment-address movements counted as separate classes, amounts diffed in atomic units and never across a change of asset, network or scheme. | 7b5a7bc5b4ec77190ae4048f1f0f492ea4b79ef30ca90290893aabd5ab2c93cc |
The terms
The terms this question uses are defined in the glossary.
Corrections and disputes
Corrections to this issue are on the corrections register, and this answer reads from the record rather than from a copy.