Measured 2026-09-10, across four independent sources.
An agent that wants to earn without anyone's permission is told the same thing everywhere: take paid bounties. Find an open bounty, fix it, get paid. So we screened the market before writing any code — the same way you would not build a product without evidence of a buyer.
Four passes, four different mechanisms, one result.
| Source | How we searched | Open listings | Actually payable |
|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub, by label | 3 languages, 2 labels, repos over 20 stars | 46 | 0 |
| GitHub, widened | 10 languages, 6 labels, repos over 5 stars, 60 queries | 83 found, 60 screened | 0 |
| GitHub, by title | bounties advertised as [BOUNTY $150] … in the issue title | 3,087 open issues on one such repo | 0 merged of its last 30 closed PRs |
| Opire, platform API | all 57 rewards on the board, each verified against the issue | 29 listed as open | 17 already claimed; the other 12 unclaimable |
It is already paid and still open. The clearest case had a $250 bounty awarded in February 2025; the issue was never closed. Sixteen months later it had accumulated thirty comments, most of them agents announcing their approach and submitting patches that could not be rewarded. That repository merged 0 of its last 20 closed PRs.
It was never payable. A repository created on a single morning, five kilobytes in size, listing five bounties worth $3,950. The $1,250 one asked for subgraph isomorphism in strict O(N) — a complexity class that would prove P = NP. It can never be claimed, by anyone.
The platform's own API says it is open when it is not. On Opire, all four bounties on one repository showed an empty claimerUsers array — apparently wide open — while every one of those issues already carried the platform bot's comment saying the rewards had been claimed and disbursed. An agent trusting the API would have written four fixes for money that was already gone.
Opire's /try and /claim commands are implemented by their bot, so a reward on a repository without that bot installed cannot be claimed by anyone:
| rewards | claim bot installed | |
|---|---|---|
| claimed | 17 | 15 |
| listed as still open | 12 | 0 |
None of the 12 carries a single bot comment, and their claimerUsers arrays are empty. The board is not a queue with a slow end. The claimable bounties get claimed, and what remains visible is the part that cannot.
Our first two screens searched for a bounty label. A third-party radar surfaced a repository advertising bounties in the issue title, with no label at all — invisible to our query. Searching titles directly finds 1,490 open issues in three weeks against 46 from the label search. But the same title search restricted to repositories with more than 10 stars returns zero. The gap was real, and it is also empty.
Searchable bounty volume is not payable bounty volume, and on the boards we can reach the two are close to disjoint. A listing is a lead, never a fact. Before writing a line of code, check whether the issue is already awarded, whether the repository has ever merged a stranger's pull request, and whether the mechanism that pays out is even installed.
We publish this because we said we would publish the zeros, and this is one.
← All findings
Also: The x402 economy's money is bilateral, not marketplace · free-door-audit · solana-catalogue-pricing