nsgoods payability verdicts vs nohumans.directory paid-delivery outcomes · published 2026-08-30 · snapshot 2026-08-30T18:14Z
We promised on r/x402 to run our verdicts against nohumans.directory's CC-BY data and publish the agreement rate. Here it is, with the caveats in plain sight.
The two tools do not measure the same thing, and saying so is the whole point.
Ours answers "will the money land." Theirs answers "did a valid response come back after I paid." Different layers.
The only per-listing machine-readable verdicts nohumans publishes are the 99 rows of wave5-endpoints.json: endpoints that, when paid, returned HTTP 400. Of those 99, 89 are present in our 28 to 30 August scans. The other 10 are not (delisted, query-variant, or newer than our snapshot). Their broader universe is about 1,522 listings with a declared payTo, but the delivered set is aggregate only, so a per-listing join is possible only on this 99 row failure subset.
On the payment-gate layer we agree on 87 of 89, which is 97.8 percent.
Every one of these 99 is an endpoint nohumans got past the 402 and paid. On 87 of the 89 we can see, our independent scan also says PAYABLE: the payment gate is well formed and the destination can receive. Two tools, different methods, the same call on "this endpoint takes payment."
The divergence is not a contradiction, it is the second layer. nohumans then got a 400 because the paid call omitted required parameters the challenge declared. 87 of the 99 declare required params, which nohumans names as the root cause. Our tool does not claim to test whether a caller supplied the right params. Theirs does. So on these 87 both readings are correct at their own layer: payable yes, delivered no, because of the caller side contract, not the payment gate. nohumans' own headline agrees: the published contract, not the payment gate, is where this failure class lives.
Only two of the 89 are genuine payment-gate divergences, both cases where we said NOT_PAYABLE. One turned out to be timing; the other, on re-verification, was our own error, corrected below. Neither is a point in our favor.
x402.shizu.me/tz: we scored NOT_PAYABLE, they got paid then 400. On live recheck it now returns a well formed Base only 402. This is timing. Our snapshot caught a NOT_PAYABLE state that has since changed. Neither instrument is wrong, the windows differ.macropulse.theaslangroupllc.com/api/fx/convert: we scored NOT_PAYABLE, they got paid then 400. Correction, 2026-08-30: our first version of this page said the endpoint advertises 14 networks including a Solana option with a missing USDC token account. The directory's author could not reproduce this, and he was right to push. On re-verification: the Solana token account exists on chain, so that claim was wrong and is withdrawn. What the evidence does show, with saved responses and hashes: the endpoint returns a self-inconsistent 402: within the same response, the JSON body carries one accepts entry labeled network base, while the PAYMENT-REQUIRED header carries 14 entries in CAIP-2 form. Which challenge you see depends on which channel your client parses, not on the request. The body is byte-stable across requests; the header rotates but always lists 14. Our scanner parses the body, so it always saw the 1-entry variant, and our evaluator scores the bare label base as not settleable, which is a label normalization gap on our side, now flagged for a fix. So this divergence is one part endpoint variance, one part our own handling, and zero parts missing token account.The instruments are mutually validating and complementary. They agree about 98 percent on whether the payment gate works. The rest is two different failure layers, each tool built to see one: their paid-delivery layer catches contract and parameter rejections our payability layer does not claim, and our pre-payment layer catches malformed and self-inconsistent challenges that a single paid call can miss. Neither replaces the other. Together they cover pre and post payment.
Data from nohumans.directory, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Cite as https://nohumans.directory/state/the-400-you-paid-for and https://nohumans.directory/state/paid-verification.
Snapshot files retained locally with sha256 for reproducibility:
b37f9bd00a18aca169e037c77c9b8248ee2be704cbdc9066a947958e526f2f0855633e9c90a9e3543c6b3685215e62f762c4206711a8541636798077c18f7615Our verdicts come from the nsgoods payability observatory full scans dated above.
2026-08-30: withdrew the claim that macropulse.theaslangroupllc.com/api/fx/convert has a missing Solana token account; on chain the token account exists, and the endpoint serves a self-inconsistent 402 whose body and PAYMENT-REQUIRED header disagree. Thanks to the nohumans.directory author for catching this.